SPRING 2020

Philippe Legrain on the coronavirus and nativism | Orville Schell on the end of Chimerica Raghuram Rajan on the need to boost local governance | James Crabtree on Britain’s

post-Brexit identity crisis | Henry Farrell on the EU in an age of nationalism

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Cover illustration by BRIAN STAUFFER/Above illustration by JUSTIN METZ

contents

026 The Ugly End of ChimericaThe coronavirus pandemic has turneda conscious uncoupling into a messy breakup. By Orville Schell

031 How to Save Global Capitalism From ItselfDecentralizing decision-making can help left-behind regions get back on track. By Raghuram Rajan

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038 Britain’s Post-Brexit Identity CrisisBoris Johnson has contradictory ideas for his country’s future—and no clear paths for getting there. By James Crabtree

044 A Most Lonely UnionThe EU is a creature of multilateralism. Can it survive in a deglobalized world? By Henry Farrell

Will the Coronavirus Kill Globalization?

The pandemic is legitimizing nationalists and turning their

xenophobia into policy. By Philippe Legrain

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 1Illustration by MIKE MCQUADE

feature050Why America Shouldn’t Abandon the Middle EastTrump has wrecked a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, causing irreparable damage to the Middle East—and the world order. By Hal Brands, Steven A. Cook, and Kenneth M. Pollack

contents

insights006 Hindi Fighting WordsJai Shri Ram was meant to celebrate a Hindu god. But the phrase has turned into a code for attacking India’s Muslims. By Snigdha Poonam

arguments009 After the CoronavirusThe pandemic has already disrupted the world. We asked 12 leading global thinkers to predict what happens next.

014 Trump Is Pushing Israel Toward ApartheidMost Israelis hate their country being compared to South Africa, but the deal of the century could make it a reality. By Alon Liel

016 First Suleimani, Then the Potemkin ProxiesWhy the United States should broaden the fight against countries that use local militias to do their dirty work. By Svante E. Cornell and Brenda Shaffer

reviews075 War Movies After WarTV shows like Occupied and Blackout Country give viewers a sense of life in a world of grayzone conflicts. By Elisabeth Braw

078 Dismantling the World’s Largest DemocracyA new book recounts the inspiring story of how India’s constitution introduced democracy to people who had never experienced it before. Those freedoms are now in jeopardy. By Sonia Faleiro

082 The Tyranny of PropertyThomas Piketty’s new book argues that rising inequality is explained by politics, not economics, and offers some radical solutions. By Keith Johnson

086 Books in BriefRecent releases on Chinese industrial espionage, the dissent channel in American diplomacy, and British anti-colonialism.

088 A Train to NowhereHovertrains were meant to revolutionize British transport. But they never arrived. By Kitty Wenham-Ross

2 SPRING 2020

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contributors

FP Analytics

Snigdha Poonam is a national affairs writer with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi. She is the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World. She has recently written on Chinese dating apps, TikTok, conflict, and India’s justice system.

Raghuram Rajan is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He previously served as the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India and chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind.

Henry Farrell is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and editor in chief of the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post. His most recent book, with Abraham L. Newman, is Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Struggle Over Freedom and Security.

Sonia Faleiro is an award-winning author and co-founder of Deca, a global journalism cooperative. She is the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars. Her new book, The Good Girls, will be published in January 2021.

Kitty Wenham-Ross is a freelance journalist and former editorial fellow at the Tempest. She writes on topics including international politics and women’s literature and history. For FOREIGN POLICY, she has most recently covered British politics.

James Crabtree is an author and journalist based in Singapore. He is an associate professor in practice at the National Universityof Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the author of The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 3

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from the editor in chief

WHEN WE FIRST STARTED PLANNING THIS ISSUE a few months ago, I never imagined that, at the last min-ute, we would have to make room for discussion of a then-unheard-of virus that would soon circle the globe.

Of course, I also didn’t imagine that I’d be making the final edits to this issue from my kitchen table while my stir-crazy 5-year-old practiced tae kwon do over FaceTime; while my wife, who works on tech-nology innovation for New York City, scrambled to somehow find millions of N95 face masks; and while two pounds of venison jerky quietly cooked away in the backyard meat smoker I’d bought a week earlier during a late-night session of online apocalypse prep. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

But if there’s one thing the coronavirus has taught us—and it has taught us plenty—it is that our plans mean nothing. We all remain nature’s playthings.

Apart from its obvious deadliness, one of the most striking things about the virus, and one reason it causes so much fear, I think, is the way it embodies and exploits the very aspects of our modern world that have caused so much political turmoil in the last few years. The features of globalization that have fueled populism and sparked social unrest—namely, mass migration, offshoring, economic interdependence, and a weakening of state sovereignty—are the very same things that allowed the virus to spread so far and so fast.

Fortunately for us at FOREIGN POLICY, we had decided months ago to focus this issue on the push-back against globalization. As a consequence, much of our newer coronavirus content has fit right in with the pieces we had been working on for weeks. So Philippe Legrain’s brilliant essay on how nationalists around the globe are exploiting the virus to insert xenophobia into government policy (see “Will the Coronavirus Kill Glo-balization?” Page 23) neatly complements RaghuramRajan’s equally brilliant discussion of how the best way to save economic globalization is to sacrifice

political globalization and return some decision-making authority to the lowest possible levels of gov-ernment (“How to Save Global Capitalism From Itself,” Page 31). Similarly, Orville Schell’s alarming article on how the coronavirus has made the impending U.S.-China breakup even messier (“The Ugly End of Chi-merica,” Page 26) complements James Crabtree’s look at the irreconcilable problems a post-Brexit Britain will face (“Britain’s Post-Brexit Identity Crisis,” Page 38) as well as Henry Farrell’s analysis of the chal-lenges the European Union—the very embodiment of globalization—will confront in a rapidly fracturing world (“A Most Lonely Union,” Page 44).

Taken together, these and the other articles in this special issue may make for alarming reading. But the fact is that our current predicament is alarm-ing. Especially since the most depressing aspect of the coronavirus crisis is the same thing that makes the onslaught of deglobalization so frustrating: Both are the result of, or have been made much worse by, the persistent failures of governments to face and help mitigate the biggest problems of our day. Still, there’s a piece of good news even in that last, dispir-iting conclusion—and that is that what people did, people can undo. There will be a world after this virus is finished with us. It’s all our job to ensure that that world is as prosperous, equitable, and free as it can be, and we at FOREIGN POLICY hope that this issue, and our ongoing work, can help.

Jonathan Tepperman

The climate change crisis can feel so formidable, so daunting, that instead of mobilizing people to action, it engenders paralysis. What could we mortals possibly do to prevent the calamity? A fair bit, it turns out.

On Heat of the Moment, a 12-part podcast by the Climate Investment Funds, we focus on ordinary people across the globe who

Hosted by CNN contributor John D. Sutter, each episode begins with an interview about a particular aspect of climate change that threatens our planet. The segment is followed by a sound-rich report highlighting one green project somewhere around the world—from Ghana to Brazil to Mexico. Listeners will hear from people who use innovation, technology, and

Heat of the Moment hopes to inspire

Listen in and learn more at foreignpolicy.com/heatofthemoment

Introducing

An FP Studios podcast, in partnership with the Climate Investment Funds

insightsHindi Fighting WordsJai Shri Ram was meant to celebrate a Hindu god. But the phrase has turned into a code for attacking India’s Muslims. By Snigdha Poonam

“JAI SHRI RAM!” THOSE WERE THE WORDS 25-year-old Kapil Gujjar shouted as he pointed his semi-automatic pistol at hundreds of unarmed women and children at Shaheen Bagh, a predomi-nantly Muslim colony in New Delhi, on Saturday, Feb. 1. It was a cool, smog-infused afternoon, and Indians from all walks of life had gathered in a peaceful protest against a controver-sial new citizenship law that especially affected the country’s poor, women, and, perhaps most of all, Muslims. Gujjar fired three bullets in the air. The crowd scattered. Later, while being handcuffed by the police, Gujjar explained his motive: “In our country, only Hindus will prevail.”

Jai Shri Ram literally translates as “Victory to Lord Ram,” a popular Hindu deity. But while this seemingly harmless phrase originated as a pious declaration of devotion in India, it is today increasingly deployed not only as a Hindu chau-vinist slogan but also as a threat to anyone who dares to chal-lenge Hindu supremacy.

GUJJAR’S MESSAGE WAS AIMED AT INDIA’S 200 MILLION MUSLIMS—the largest religious minority in a mostly Hindu population of 1.3 billion people—who have become unwitting targets in an us-versus-them culture war waged by Prime Minister Nar-endra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The latest catalyst for tensions is the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which discriminates on the basis of religion. The law grants citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Bangla-desh, and Pakistan who are Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, or Zoroastrians—but not Muslims—as long as they entered India before 2015.

Activists point out that the CAA goes against the secu-lar principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution. And when coupled with a proposed national registry of citizens

DECODERINTERPRETING THE ESSENTIAL

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that could force people to prove their citizenship, the government’s plans could hurt the many millions of poor and illiterate Indians who don’t possess any documents to further their claims. Until the recent pandemic-related lock-downs, mass protests had seized the country’s cities and towns after the CAA was passed on Dec. 11; in scenes unprecedented in modern India, thou-sands of demonstrators formed human chains, sang the national anthem, and read the constitution aloud. Shaheen Bagh, where hundreds of local Muslim women staged a sit-in at the start of this year, became the center of the national movement as more and more Indians—students, professionals, activists, sing-ers, artists—joined them every day.

Two days before Gujjar walked into Shaheen Bagh, another young man, a teenager, produced a pistol near the area and shot at anti-CAA demonstrators, injuring one and terrifying hundreds. The juvenile shooter, whom Indian law prohibits the media from naming, had apparently been prepared to become a martyr in what he perceived as a war for Hindu supremacy. In a Facebook video he recorded while on his way to Shaheen Bagh, he had left instruc-tions for his fellow warriors: “On my final journey, cover me in saffron clothes and chant Jai Shri Ram.” The phrase has provoked terror in the capital since the beginning of this year: On the night of Jan. 5, a group of masked attackers affiliated with the Hindu far-right cried “Jai Shri Ram” as they entered Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, a hub of left-wing politics, and brutally beat up students who had been protesting against a recent fee hike.

6 SPRING 2020

RAM, THE POPULAR HINDU GOD, is the pro-tagonist of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, said to be written sometime between the seventh and third centuries B.C. In modern, mainstream depictions of the Ramayana, Ram is extolled as the embodiment of the perfect man: an exiled prince who rescues his abducted wife and destroys an evil empire before returning home to assume his rightful throne. Ram is always described as just, brave, self-sacrificing, and righteous. His followers even justify the fact that he later abandoned his wife, Sita, after common-ers questioned her purity—after all, they argue, Ram’s role as king superseded his duties as a husband. He was likely only following the social mores of his era.

In Hindi-speaking regions, Hindus have invoked Ram’s name for more than a century in regular greetings, in

in Hindi-speaking parts of India, and it depicted Ram as an ideal, pious man with a beatific smile—until he encoun-tered evil, which he slew on sight. But Ram never used his special powers unless it was warranted. “Attacking the weak or the innocent to show your arro-gance or your might doesn’t count as the dharma [duty] of the brave,” Ram’s spiri-tual mentor, Vishwamitra, advises while awarding him with celestial weapons.

Some purported followers of Ram now seem to have a different inter-pretation of dharma. Last year, across several incidents, dozens of poor and innocent Indians were attacked because they refused to say the words Jai Shri Ram. On June 18, a 24-year-old man was lynched in Jharkhand; on June 20, a 40-year-old cleric was hit by a car in Delhi; on June 23, a 25-year-old cab

exclamation, and in folk songs. The dei-ty’s political influence goes back even further. In the 12th century, a “sudden rush of temples [were] built for Ram” in response to the establishment of the first sultanate in Delhi in 1206, the journalist Shoaib Daniyal points out in Scroll.in. “In the 17th century, for example, two Marathi Ramayans were written, one which compared Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb to Raavan [Ram’s nemesis] and the other to Raavan’s gluttonous brother Kumbhakarna,” he writes.

But the phrase’s cultural relevance changed markedly in the last four decades, when it began to take on a dif-ferent meaning. I first heard the words while watching the late 1980s television adaptation of Ramayana that aired on the national broadcaster Doordarshan. The program became a Sunday ritual

Illustration by ANONYMOUS FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 7

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driver was beaten up in Thane near Mumbai; and on July 28, a 15-year-old boy was set on fire in Uttar Pradesh. In each of these attacks, the victims were Muslim, and they were asked to chant Jai Shri Ram by as few as three and as many as 30 Hindu assailants.

The slogan is deployed as effectively in violence as it is in entertainment. Last July, as Muslims were being forced to intone Jai Shri Ram, the country seemed gripped by a viral music video (now deleted) on YouTube titled “Jo Na bole Jai Sri Ram, bhej do usko kabris-tan” (Those who don’t say Jai Shri Ram, send them to their graveyards). The ref-erence to cemeteries made clear that the message was directed at Muslims and Christians. Four people involved in making and uploading the video were later arrested. There is no stopping the messages of hate, however. On YouTube, one can now find dozens of songs glori-fying Ram and denigrating minorities. Most of them mix Hindi hate speech with electronic beats. Some are so pop-ular that they are requested at weddings and played in clubs. “Hindu Blood Hit,” for example, has been viewed more than 3.8 million times. Between psychedelic repetitions of Jai Shri Ram, the singer warns India’s Muslims that their time is up. Other viral songs can be geopolitical: “Jai Shree Ram DJ Vicky Mix” calls for a future in which “there will continue to be a Kashmir but no Pakistan.”

T H E 1 9 8 0 S T E L E V I S I O N S H O W of the Ramayana reached millions of Indians right as the BJP accelerated its project to unite Hindi-speaking Hindus around the figure of Ram. This was a bold politi-cal experiment. Although widely known as the hero of the Ramayana, which has been published in multiple languages and dialects, Ram was worshipped only selectively in India. In some parts such as Tamil Nadu, his worship elicits hos-tility by those who see the Ramayana’s narrative as racist toward Dravidians, the ancestral inhabitants of southern India. In West Bengal, where the majority of

Last June, cries of Jai Shri Ram echoed through the Indian Parlia-ment after the BJP was reelected with a sweeping majority, winning 303 of 543 parliamentary seats in an ugly, polar-ized election. The words were used to heckle Muslim legislators as they took their oaths to uphold the Indian Con-stitution. Five months later, India’s Supreme Court settled the country’s longest-running property dispute by ruling in favor of a Ram temple to be built in Ayodhya at the same site where the mosque was demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992. The Muslim peti-tioners were granted 5 acres elsewhere in the city to build a mosque. On Nov. 9, as the government commenced arrangements for building the temple, Modi tweeted his response to the court verdict: “May peace and harmony pre-vail!” But those words seem lost amid the dog whistles sounded by senior leaders and amplified on social media with impunity. It is no surprise then that the devotees firing bullets at Shaheen Bagh have different intentions.

SNIGDHA POONAM (@snigdhapoonam) is a journalist with the Hindustan Times in New Delhi and the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World.

Hindus worship the goddesses Durga and Kali, Ram’s name doesn’t resonate widely.

But Ram’s imprint has spread in the years since the BJP chose him as the mascot for its project to build and culti-vate a Hindu base of voters. The center for this project was the city of Ayodhya, where a 16th-century Mughal mosque occupied what some believe to be the site of Ram’s birth. Around the mid-19th century, regional Hindu organi-zations attempted to claim the site and build a temple to Ram on the mosque’s grounds. But then, in the 1980s, the BJP and its ideological allies turned the local demand for a Ram temple at the site into a sweeping Hindu nationalist movement. The slogan for this move-ment, which was led by BJP leader and then-Home Minister L.K. Advani, was Jai Shri Ram. The words were chanted, loud and clear, as the foundation for the temple was laid next to the mosque and bricks were loaded into trucks and trains headed for Ayodhya. And the same words tore through the city on Dec. 6, 1992, as thousands of Hindu volunteers pounded the mosque with hammers and axes. In a matter of hours, the building was razed; riots sparked throughout India. Jai Shri Ram now had an additional meaning: an expression of Hindu dominance and the BJP’s rise.

Ramanand Sagar’s TV adaptation of the epic

Hindu poem Ramayana.

8 SPRING 2020

MUCH LIKE THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the coronavirus pandemic is a world- shattering event whose far-ranging consequences we can only begin to imagine today. This much is certain: Just as the disease has shattered lives, disrupted markets, and exposed the competence (or lack thereof) of governments, it will lead to permanent shifts in political and economic power in ways

After the CoronavirusThe pandemic has already disrupted the world. We asked 12 leading global thinkers to predict what happens next.

that will become apparent only later. To help us make sense of the ground shifting beneath our feet as this crisis unfolds, FOREIGN POLICY asked 12 lead-ing thinkers from around the world to weigh in with their predictions for the global order after the pandemic.

Illustration by BRIAN STAUFFER FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 9

arguments

A World Less Open, Prosperous, and Freeb y S T E P H E N M . WA L T

T H E C O R O N AV I R U S P A N D E M I C wil l strengthen the state and reinforce nationalism. Governments of all types will adopt emergency measures to manage the crisis, and many will be loath to relinquish these new powers when it is over.

The crisis will also accelerate the shift in power and influence from West to East. South Korea and Singapore have responded best, and China has reacted well after its early mistakes. The response in Europe and the United States has been slow and haphazard by comparison, further tarnishing the aura of the Western brand.

What won’t change is the fundamen-tally conflictive nature of world poli-tics. Previous plagues—including the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919—did not end great-power rivalry nor usher in a new era of global cooperation. Neither will the coronavirus. We will see a further retreat from hyperglo-balization, as citizens look to national governments to protect them and as states and firms seek to reduce future vulnerabilities.

In short, the coronavirus will cre-ate a world that is less open, less pros-perous, and less free. It did not have to be this way, but the combination of a fast-spreading virus, inadequate plan-ning, and incompetent leadership has placed humanity on a new and worri-some path.

STEPHEN M. WALT (@stephenWalt) is a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The End of Globalization as We Know Itb y R O B I N N I B L E T T

THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of economic globalization. China’s grow-ing economic and military power had already provoked a bipartisan determi-nation in the United States to decouple China from U.S.-sourced technology and intellectual property and try to force allies to follow suit. Increasing public and political pressure to meet carbon emissions reduction targets had already called into question many companies’ reliance on long-distance supply chains. Now the coronavirus is forcing governments, companies, and societies to strengthen their capacity to cope with extended periods of eco-nomic self-isolation.

It seems highly unlikely in this con-text that the world will return to the idea of mutually beneficial globaliza-tion that defined the early 21st century. And without the incentive to protect the shared gains from global economic integration, the architecture of global economic governance established in the 20th century will quickly atrophy. It will then take enormous self-discipline for political leaders to sustain interna-tional cooperation and not retreat into overt geopolitical competition.

Proving to their citizens that they can manage the coronavirus crisis will buy leaders some political capital. But those who fail will find it hard to resist the temptation to blame others for their failure.

ROBIN NIBLETT (@RobinNiblett) is the director and chief executive of Chatham House.

A More China-Centric Globalizationb y K I S H O R E M A H B U B A N I

THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC will not fundamentally alter global economic directions. It will only accelerate a change that had already begun: a move away from U.S.-centric globalization to a more China-centric globalization.

Why will this trend continue? The U.S. population has lost faith in globaliza-tion and international trade. Free trade agreements are toxic, with or without U.S. President Donald Trump. By con-trast, China has not lost faith. Why not? There are deeper historical reasons. Chi-nese leaders now know well that China’s century of humiliation from 1842 to 1949 was a result of its own complacency and a futile effort by its leaders to cut it off from the world. By contrast, the past few decades of economic resurgence were a result of global engagement. The Chi-nese people have also experienced an explosion of cultural confidence. They believe they can compete anywhere.

Consequently, as I document in my new book, Has China Won?, the United States has two choices. If its primary goal is to maintain global primacy, it will have to engage in a zero-sum geo-political contest, politically and eco-nomically, with China. However, if the goal of the United States is to improve the well-being of the American peo-ple—whose social condition has dete-riorated—it should cooperate with China. Wiser counsel would suggest that cooperation would be the better choice. However, given the toxic U.S. political environment toward China, wiser counsel may not prevail.

KISHORE MAHBUBANI (@mahbubani_k) is a distinguished fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.

10 SPRING 2020

Democracies Will Come Out of Their Shellb y G . J O H N I K E N B E R R Y

IN THE SHORT TERM, the coronavirus cri-sis will give fuel to all the various camps in the Western grand strategy debate. The nationalists and anti-globalists, the China hawks, and even the liberal inter-nationalists will all see new evidence for the urgency of their views. Given the economic damage and social collapse unfolding, it is hard to see anything other than a reinforcement of the shift toward nationalism, great-power rivalry, strate-gic decoupling, and the like.

But just as in the 1930s and ’40s, there might also be a slower-evolving counter-current, a sort of hardheaded interna-tionalism similar to the one that Franklin D. Roosevelt and a few other statesmen began to articulate before and during the war. The 1930s collapse of the world econ-omy showed how connected modern societies were and how vulnerable they were to what FDR called “contagion.” What FDR and other internationalists conjured was a postwar order that would rebuild an open system with new forms of protection and capacities to manage interdependence. The United States couldn’t simply hide within its borders, but to operate in an open postwar order required building a global infrastructure of multilateral cooperation.

So the United States and other West-ern democracies might travel through this same sequence of reactions driven by a cascading sense of vulnerability; the response might be more nation-alist at first, but over the longer term, the democracies will come out of their shells to find a new type of pragmatic and protective internationalism.

G. JOHN IKENBERRY is a professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and Interna-tional Affairs.

Lower Profits but More Stabilityb y S H A N N O N K . O ’ N E I L

THE CORONAVIRUS IS UNDERMINING the basic tenets of global manufactur-ing. Companies will now rethink and shrink the multistep, multicountry supply chains that dominate produc-tion today.

Global supply chains were already coming under fire—economically, due to rising Chinese labor costs, U.S. Pres-ident Donald Trump’s trade war, and advances in robotics, automation, and 3D printing, as well as politically, due to real and perceived job losses, espe-cially in mature economies. The coro-navirus has now broken many of these links: Factory closings in afflicted areas have left other manufacturers—as well as hospitals, pharmacies, supermar-kets, and retail stores—bereft of inven-tories and products.

On the other side of the pandemic, more companies will demand to know more about where their supplies come from and will trade off efficiency for redundancy. Governments will inter-vene as well, forcing what they con-sider strategic industries to have domestic backup plans and reserves. Profitability will fall, but supply sta-bility should rise.

SHANNON K. O’NEIL (@shannonkoneil) is the vice president, deputy director of studies, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This Pandemic Can Serve a Useful Purposeb y S H I V S H A N K A R M E N O N

IT IS EARLY DAYS YET, but three things seem apparent. First, the coronavirus pandemic will change our politics, both within states and between them. It is to the power of government that soci-eties—even libertarians—have turned. Government’s relative success in over-coming the pandemic and its economic effects will exacerbate or diminish security issues and the recent polar-ization within societies. Either way, government is back. Experience so far shows that authoritarians or populists are no better at handling the pandemic. Indeed, the countries that responded early and successfully, such as South Korea and Taiwan, have been democ-racies—not those run by populist or authoritarian leaders.

Secondly, this is not yet the end of an interconnected world. The pandemic itself is proof of our interdependence. But in all polities, there is already a turning inward, a search for auton-omy and control of one’s own fate. We are headed for a poorer, meaner, and smaller world.

Finally, there are signs of hope and good sense. India took the initiative to convene a video conference of all South Asian leaders to craft a common regional response to the threat. If the pandemic shocks us into recognizing our real interest in cooperating multi-laterally on the big global issues facing us, it will have served a useful purpose.

SHIVSHANKAR MENON (@Shivshanka Menon) is a distinguished fellow at Brookings India.

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arguments

U.S. Power Will Need a New Strategyb y J O S E P H S . N Y E J R .

IN 2017, U.S. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP announced a new national security strategy that focused on great-power competition. The coronavirus crisis shows this strategy to be inadequate. Even if the United States prevails as a great power, it cannot protect its secu-rity by acting alone. As former U.S. Navy Secretary Richard Danzig sum-marized the problem in 2018: “Twenty- first century technologies are global not just in their distribution, but also in their consequences. Pathogens, AI sys-tems, computer viruses, and radiation that others may accidentally release could become as much our problem as theirs. Agreed reporting systems, shared controls, common contingency plans, norms, and treaties must be pursued as means of moderating our numerous mutual risks.”

On transnational threats like the coronavirus and climate change, it is not enough to think of U.S. power over other nations. The key to success is also learning the importance of power with others. Every country puts its national interest first; the important question is how broadly or narrowly this interest is defined. The coronavirus pandemic shows the United States is failing to adjust its strategy to this new world.

JOSEPH S. NYE JR. (@Joe_Nye) is a uni-versity distinguished service pro-fessor emeritus at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The History of the Coronavirus Pandemic Will Be Written by the Victorsb y J O H N R . A L L E N

AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN, history will be written by the victors of the coronavi-rus crisis. Every nation, and increas-ingly every individual, is experiencing the societal strain of this disease in new and powerful ways. Inevitably, those nations that persevere—by virtue of their unique political and economic systems, as well as from a public health perspective—will claim success over those that experience a different, more devastating outcome. To some, this will appear as a great and definitive triumph for democracy, multilateral-ism, and universal health care. To oth-ers, it will showcase the clear benefits of decisive, authoritarian rule.

Either way, this crisis will reshuffle the international power structure in ways we can only begin to imagine. It will continue to depress economic activ-ity and increase tension between coun-tries. Over the long term, the pandemic will likely significantly reduce the pro-ductive capacity of the global economy, especially if businesses close and indi-viduals detach from the labor force. This risk of dislocation is especially great for developing nations and others with a large share of economically vulnera-ble workers. The international system will, in turn, come under great pressure, resulting in instability and widespread conflict within and across countries.

JOHN R. ALLEN is the president of the Brookings Institution.

A Dramatic New Stage in Global Capitalismb y L A U R I E G A R R E T T

THE GREAT SHOCK to the world’s finan-cial and economic system is the rec-ognition that global supply chains and distribution networks are deeply vul-nerable to disruption. The coronavirus pandemic will therefore not only have long-lasting economic effects but lead to a more fundamental change. Glo-balization allowed companies to farm out manufacturing all over the world and deliver their products to markets on a just-in-time basis, bypassing the costs of warehousing. Inventories that sat on shelves for more than a few days were considered market failures. Sup-ply had to be sourced and shipped on a carefully orchestrated, global level. The coronavirus has proved that pathogens can not only infect people but poison the entire just-in-time system.

Given the scale of financial market losses the world has experienced since February, companies are likely to come out of this pandemic decidedly gun-shy about the just-in-time model and about globally dispersed production. The result could be a dramatic new stage in global capitalism, in which supply chains are brought closer to home and filled with redundancies to protect against future disruption. That may cut into companies’ near-term profits but render the entire sys-tem more resilient.

LAURIE GARRETT (@Laurie_Garrett) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and a columnist at FOREIGN POLICY.

12 SPRING 2020

More Failed Statesb y R I C H A R D N . H A A S S

PERMANENT IS NOT A WORD I AM FOND OF, as little or nothing is, but I would think the coronavirus crisis will at least for a few years lead most governments to turn inward, focusing on what takes place within their borders rather than on what happens beyond them. I anticipate greater moves toward selective self-suffi-ciency (and, as a result, decoupling) given supply chain vulnerability; even greater opposition to large-scale immigration; and a reduced willingness or commit-ment to tackle regional or global prob-lems (including climate change) given the perceived need to dedicate resources to rebuild at home and deal with eco-nomic consequences of the pandemic.

I would expect many countries to have difficulty recovering, with state weakness and failed states becom-ing an even more prevalent feature of the world. The crisis will likely con-tribute to the ongoing deterioration of Sino-American relations and the weakening of European integration. On the positive side, we should see some modest strengthening of global public health gover-nance. But overall, a crisis rooted in globalization will weaken rather than add to the world’s willingness and ability to deal with it.

RICHARD N. HAASS (@Rich-ardHaass) is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The United States Has Failed the Leadership Testb y K O R I S C H A K E

THE UNITED STATES WILL NO LONGER BE SEEN as an international leader because of its government’s narrow self-inter-est and bungling incompetence. The global effects of this pandemic could have been greatly attenuated by hav-ing international organizations pro-vide more and earlier information, which would have given governments time to prepare and direct resources to where they were most needed. This was something the United States could have organized, showing that while it was self-interested, it was not solely self-interested. Washington has failed the leadership test, and the world is worse off for it.

KORI SCHAKE (@KoriSchake) is the director of foreign and defense pol-icy studies at the American Enter-prise Institute.

In Every Country, We See the Power of the Human Spiritb y N I C H O L A S B U R N S

THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC is the great-est global crisis of this century. Its depth and scale are enormous. The public health crisis threatens each of the 7.8 billion people on Earth. The financial and economic crisis could exceed in its impact the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Each crisis alone could provide a seismic shock that permanently changes the international system and balance of power as we know it.

To date, international collaboration has been woefully insufficient. If the United States and China, the world’s most powerful countries, cannot put aside their war of words over which of them is responsible for the crisis and lead more effectively, both countries’ credibility may be significantly dimin-ished. If the European Union cannot provide more targeted assistance to its 500 million citizens, national gov-ernments might take back more power from Brussels in the future. In the United States, what is most at stake is the abil-ity of the federal government to provide effective measures to stem the crisis.

In every country, however, there are many examples of the power of the human spirit—of doctors, nurses, political leaders, and ordinary citizens demonstrating resilience, effective-ness, and leadership. That provides hope that people around the world can prevail in response to this extraordi-nary challenge.

NICHOLAS BURNS (@RNicholasBurns) is a professor of diplomacy and international relations at the Har-vard Kennedy School.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 13

arguments

IIN THE HEYDAY OF SOUTH AFRICA’S APARTHEID REGIME, the country’s white minority government planned to create 10 so-called homelands—also known as Bantustans—where black South Africans could live far away from the cities it hoped to keep white. It was the culmination of what the regime called “sep-arate development”—an effort to deflect attention from racial oppression by claiming black people had been granted independence in their own states and weren’t second-class citizens in South Africa.

The apartheid government ultimately created only four ostensibly independent Bantustans (Bophuthatswana, Venda,

Trump Is Pushing Israel Toward ApartheidMost Israelis hate their country being compared to South Africa, but the deal of the century could make it a reality. By Alon Liel

Ciskei, and Transkei) and six supposedly self-governing territories. Foreign gov-ernments for the most part dismissed the puppet states for what they were; South Africa was the only country in the world to officially recognize the Bantustans, and the major decisions regarding their affairs were made exclusively in Pretoria.

I have devoted decades of my life to Israel’s foreign service, including serving as a South Africa desk officer

14 SPRING 2020

in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the apartheid era and as the Israeli ambassador to South Africa from 1992 to 1994, during the coun-try’s transition to democracy.

During these years, I learned, to my dismay, that no country in the world (with the exception of South Africa) con-tributed more to the economy of the Bantustans than Israel. Israelis built factories, neighborhoods, a hospital, and even a soccer stadium and an alliga-tor farm in these South African puppet states. Israel went so far as to allow one of them, Bophuthatswana, to maintain a diplomatic mission in Tel Aviv, and its leader, Lucas Mangope—shunned by the entire world for advancing and legitimizing apartheid by cooperating with the South African regime—was a frequent guest in Israel.

As the entire world boycotted the Bantustan sham, Israel—motivated by the desire for security cooperation and an export market for its arms indus-try—mobilized to support the apartheid regime. Israel’s security cooperation with South Africa began in 1974 and ended only with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994.

The 20-year relationship was wide-ranging in scope and included joint development of arms between the two countries and Israeli supply of military training and arms to South Africa. In fact, South Africa was at times the larg-est buyer of Israeli arms. This coopera-tion had been going on for almost two decades by the time I became ambassa-dor and was so intricate that even I, as ambassador, was not privy to its details; it was coordinated in large part by the defense ministry rather than the for-eign ministry. Through this cooperation, Israel became one of South Africa’s clos-est allies—economically, militarily, and diplomatically—and heeded its request to help develop the Bantustans.

Ultimately, of course, these Ban-tustans fell, along with the apartheid regime, thanks in part to interna-tional organizing and nonrecognition,

The details of the proposal, and the rhetoric used by both Trump and Netanyahu, made it clear that this was not a deal but rather the implementa-tion of Netanyahu’s long-standing plan to further entrench Israel’s control of the West Bank by giving its residents disconnected enclaves of territory without granting them real freedom or basic political rights. That was pre-cisely the goal of the old South African government’s Bantustan policy, too.

Trump did not just try to hand his friend almost a third of the West Bank, but he also—and perhaps primarily—tried to provide Netanyahu with a route toward international acceptance. Sim-ilar to U.S. recognition of Israeli sover-eignty over the Golan Heights and the move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusa-lem, Trump continues to signal that he can and will erase the time-honored policies of the international commu-nity with his own diktats.

This is bad news for millions of Pales-tinians—but not for them alone. Over the years, the United Nations has established that partitioning the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into two independent states is the only just and sustainable solution.

This solution is predicated on the belief that all 14 million people cur-rently living on that land have a right to independence, equality, and dignity and that the best way to ensure this out-come is an end to the Israeli occupa-tion, now in place for more than half a century, and partition based on the pre-1967 borders.

Prominent institutions such as the European Union and the Arab League

The map attached to the Trump plan is an imitation of the Bantustan model, with Palestinian fragments surrounded by territory fully under Israeli control, making permanent the domination of one ethnic or religious group over another.

including pressure and boycotts—despite white supremacist Afrikaner groups defending the Bantustans until the dying days of apartheid.

It is now clear that attempts to white-wash a discriminatory, oppressive regime by creating fictitious autonomous states inhabited by subjects who have no real political rights did not work in South Africa and they will not work elsewhere.

This lesson, however, is now being tested. With active support from the United States in the form of President Donald Trump’s so-called “deal of the century,” Israel is seeking to introduce and develop the new millennium’s ver-sion of the old South Africa’s deplor-able policy.

In late January, Trump bestowed yet another gift on his close friend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the March 2 election in Israel, presenting a plan that his son-in-law and emissaries devised without any Pal-estinians present.

Left: Palestinians walk past a house occupied by Israeli settlers in the West Bank on July 26, 2017. Above: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds up U.S. President Donald Trump’s Vision for Peace map while speaking at the United Nations in New York on Feb. 11.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 15

16 SPRING 2020

arguments

have repeatedly expressed their sup-port for and commitment to this model, as have previous U.S. admin-istrations, led by both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, the inter-national community’s professed com-mitment to the two-state solution has yet to manifest itself in any substan-tive way, which seems to have led Net-anyahu and Trump to the conclusion that the coast is clear for their annex-ationist vision.

The map attached to the Trump plan is an imitation of the Bantustan model, with Palestinian fragments surrounded by territory fully under Israeli control, making permanent the domination of one ethnic or religious group over another. It thus violates the principles of the rules-based international order, signaling that Trump believes he can disregard international law and legiti-mize a new 21st-century model of apart-heid. This arrogant show of force must be met with a clear answer.

It was just three years ago that the U.N. Security Council adopted Reso-lution 2334, asserting that settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories were unlawful and that no unilateral changes to the pre-1967 borders would be recognized. To respond to Trump and Netanyahu—and given the latter’s announcement of plans to annex ter-ritory within a few months—regional and Western leaders and major inter-national institutions must once again speak up loudly and clearly.

No one must give even tacit approval to this new form of apartheid and the ideology undergirding it. Doing so would betray not only the legacy and efficacy of international resistance to South African apartheid but also the fate of millions of people living in Israel and what should be a truly independent Palestine.

ALON LIEL served as Israel’s ambassa-dor to South Africa from 1992 to 1994 and was the director-general of Isra-el’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2001.

By killing Suleimani, the United States indicated it would no longer tolerate Iran’s use of proxies to circumvent its responsibility for killing Americans and for other acts of terrorism and mass bloodshed. Washington decided to de al with the source of the terrorism, not its emissaries. The same principle should apply to the many proxy regimes established by various states—Russia most prominently—to circumvent responsibility for illegal military occupations.

Countries around the world are increasingly realizing that the most convenient way to occupy foreign territories is to set up a proxy with the ceremonial trappings of a state, includ-ing a government, parliament, and flag. Why go through all that trouble? Because the norms of the liberal international order, which outlaw changing boundaries by force, risk lead-ing to sanctions for the perpetrator state. Creating a proxy regime generates a convenient falsehood that obfuscates reality and helps states evade such consequences.

The most systematic user of this tactic is Russia. Since the early 1990s, it has manipulated ethnic conflicts in three dif-ferent states and helped set up nominally independent enti-ties over which it exerts control. Moscow’s practice began in Moldova’s Transnistria region and in two breakaway ter-ritories of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Following

First Suleimani, Then the Potemkin ProxiesWhy the United States should broaden the fight against countries that use local militias to do their dirty work. By Svante E. Cornell and Brenda Shaffer

16 SPRING 2020

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 17

powers refer to these lands as what they are: occupied territories.

Moscow’s tactic proved so success-ful in undermining the statehood of Georgia and Moldova that the Krem-lin decided to use the same tactic in eastern Ukraine. And it worked: Con-trast the international reaction to any of these conflicts with Moscow’s inva-sion of Crimea. Unlike these other cases, Moscow annexed Crimea out-right, thereby accepting responsibil-ity for its actions. This led to serious sanctions that remain in force to this day. But where Moscow hid behind the fiction of a “Donetsk People’s Repub-lic,” which it created from thin air, it has largely escaped those consequences.

Similarly, Armenia not only occu-pied a sixth of Azerbaijan’s territory in the war in the early 1990s but evicted 700,000 occupants of these lands. But Armenia is subject to no sanctions what-soever, mainly because Yerevan hides behind the fiction that it is not really a party to the conflict at all but that the “Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh” is. Never mind that Nagorno-Karabakh’s two most prominent leaders went on to serve as Armenia’s presidents for 20 years and that other senior officials rotate seamlessly between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The entity’s most recent foreign minister was an Armenian diplomat for several decades, and on completion of his term in Nagorno-Kara-bakh, he returned to the Foreign Ministry in Yerevan. Likewise, Armenia’s deputy chief of the general staff was immedi-ately appointed to serve as the defense minister of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2015. As in Russia’s case, the fiction of a proxy regime seems enough to achieve impu-nity. Even a considerable Armenian effort to build settlements in the occu-pied territories has led to a yawn in the international community.

The United States and European Union treated Russia like an arbiter in these conflicts, long after it was clear it was in fact a party to them.A

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Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in the early 2000s, the Kremlin’s con-trol of these territories became tighter. Putin appointed Russian military and security officials to ministerial positions in the governing structures of these ter-ritories, indicating their direct subor-dination to Russia. Following its 2008 war with Georgia, Russia established permanent military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and formally recog-nized the independence of the two ter-ritories. This allowed Moscow to create a fictive legal basis for its military pres-ence, based on so-called interstate agree-ments it signed with its proxies.

But until the 2008 war, the United States and European Union treated Russia like an arbiter in these conflicts, long after it was clear it was in fact a party to them. Twice a year, for exam-ple, Western powers approved exten-sions to the United Nations monitoring mission in the Abkhazia conflict that included overt praise for a so-called Russian peacekeeping force that in fact was part of Moscow’s effort to shore up Abkhazia’s separation from Geor-gia. Even today, only rarely do Western

A pro-Russian activist guards a barricade next to a flag of the so-called People’s

Republic of Donetsk in the eastern Ukrainian city on April 21, 2014.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 17

arguments

Still, the United States has enter-tained the notion that Nagorno-Kara-bakh is somehow separate from Armenia. The U.S. Justice Depart-ment’s record of foreign agents in the United States lists “Nagorno Karabakh” and allows the so-called “Nagorno Karabakh Republic” to present itself as a foreign government and not be listed under the Armenia filing. Sev-eral U.S. Congress members host meet-ings with the proxy representatives, often visit the region and hold direct meetings with Armenians from the occupied territory, and some even refer to Nagorno-Karabakh as a state. Few, if any, Western leaders point out the exchange of personnel between Arme-nia and Nagorno-Karabakh, let alone impose any consequences for it.

Through establishing proxies, occu-pying states succeed to not be labeled as such. U.S. officials rarely mention Arme-nia’s occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh or Russia’s occupation of Abkhazia and Transnistria the way they refer to Rus-sia’s occupation of Crimea or Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights. U.S. government-funded media broadcasts like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty use awkward wording to avoid saying directly that Armenia’s forces occupy Nagorno-Karabakh: The “region has been under the control of ethnic-Arme-nian forces that Azerbaijan says include troops supplied by Armenia” and “Arme-nia-backed separatist forces,” ignoring the fact that they are official units of the Armenian military and that Armenia’s press regularly reports that Armenian soldiers are killed in skirmishes in the conflict zone. The U.S. government-spon-sored broadcasts also refrain from stating that Moscow occupies regions of Ukraine and Georgia, preferring “Moscow-backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern regions of Donetsk” and “Moscow-backed break-away Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”

Why this double standard? Maybe because the United States, EU, and the international system writ large are happy

to have an easy way out. If accepting the fiction of a proxy helps reduce the load on their policy agenda, they appear happy to do so. The U.S. State Depart-ment does not challenge these fictions. It is a convenient non-truth that removes the issues from the State Department’s policy agenda. In Europe, however, the European Court of Human Rights has established that Russia exerts “effec-tive control” in Transnistria and that Armenia does so in Nagorno-Karabakh. The EU has yet to allow these determi-nations to guide its policies, but at least key institutions have begun to question the fiction of the proxy regimes.

Why do proxies matter? Are they not just one of the many inequities in inter-national politics that, while regrettable, are just a fact of life? There are two key reasons the United States should pay more attention to this problem. First, the fiction of proxies has directly caused greater instability in areas important to U.S. national interests. And second, they effectively serve to make conflict resolution impossible.

The danger of the use of proxies is that its effectiveness has made it increasingly popular. When weighing options in Ukraine in 2014 and onward, Putin no doubt operated on the basis of the Russian experience in Georgia and Moldova: Setting up proxies in east-ern Ukraine would achieve the goal of undermining Ukraine and block-ing its move toward NATO while car-rying few costs for Russia. While Putin may have underestimated the tenac-ity of the U.S.-led sanctions regime, his calculation was essentially correct. Thus, because the West tolerated the proxy fiction in small states like Geor-gia and Moldova, it now has to deal with a threat to a much larger Euro-pean state. If that works, the strategy will be used elsewhere, too.

Further, if the proxy model is allowed to continue, others will copy it. What is to stop Israel from telling the Palestin-ians to talk to the “Republic of Judea and Samaria” any time they have a

problem with soldiers or settlers in the West Bank? Perhaps Israel would have spared itself a lot of headaches if it had declared a so-called independent state in the occupied territories. Why should Myanmar not blame Rakhine forces for the killing of Rohingya and thus evade international responsibility as a sover-eign? It works for Russia and Armenia.

Similarly, the proxy fiction by design makes conflict resolution impossible. Whenever there is pressure on Arme-nia to make concessions in its conflict with Azerbaijan, for example, Armenian leaders emphasize that negotiations should really be held with the “Repub-lic of Nagorno-Karabakh,” thus evading responsibility for their military occupa-tion—and escaping any consequences for it. The fact that Armenia is not willing to even admit that its forces are actively at war with Azerbaijan is not a basis for con-fidence-building in the peace process.

The proxies also facilitate illicit activ-ity. With no state formally acknowledging its control and therefore responsibility for activity in the proxy regimes, these regions have become centers of human trafficking, money laundering, and coun-terfeit goods production. They are also likely locations of sanctions violations, for Russia and for Iran.

In the Middle East, the Trump admin-istration understood that Iran’s use of proxies was helping it to undermine U.S. interests and the stability of a half-dozen states in its neighborhood. It is now working to put an end to this sub-terfuge. The time has come for Washing-ton to call the same bluff everywhere.

SVANTE E. CORNELL (@SvanteCornell) is the director of the Central Asia- Caucasus Institute and co-founder of the Institute for Security and Develop-ment Policy. BRENDA SHAFFER (@ProfBShaffer) is a visiting researcher at Georgetown University. They are the authors of the report “Occupied Elsewhere: Selective Poli-cies on Occupations, Protracted Con-flicts, and Territorial Disputes.”

18 SPRING 2020

UNLEASHING THE POWER OF WOMEN TO TRANSFORM MALE-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES

A PREVIEW OF FP ANALYTICS’ SPECIAL REPORT

WOMEN ASLEVERS OF

CHANGE

Today, a number of well-established legacy industries are facing growing pressure to innovate and transform to remain competitive in the global economy. Increased governmental regulation; intensified global competition; and rising consumer, employee, and investor concerns over the environment, human rights, and global health are pushing companies to improve business practices and products. Failure to address and surmount these challenges could compromise these industries’ survival and may even render some companies obsolete.

Increasing gender diversity in traditionally male-dominated

challenges as well as facilitate and accelerate progress toward global sustainable development. Representing half of the global labor force and half of new graduates with higher education each year, women are a major—but often overlooked or neglected—source of talent. Increasing women’s participation could not only enhance companies’ human resources, but also boost their innovation and organizational performance.

Amid growing global advocacy movements for gender equality and diversity, evidence has emerged demonstrating

with increasing women’s participation. Crucially, however, a major knowledge gap remains as to how women are advancing organizational and industrial transformation, and what can be done to unleash women’s potential as changemakers.

to tap into women’s talent and institute concrete, meaningful change at scale.

To address this research gap and contribute to the ongoing discourse, FP Analytics (FPA) conducted a pioneering study of fourteen legacy industries, which are among the most male-

WOMENASLEVERSOFCHANGE.COM

WOMEN AS LEVERS OF CHANGE

PREVIEW

dominated and have wide-reaching environmental, health, and social impacts. Through data analysis of over 2,300 publicly listed companies around the world and more than 160 in-depth, one-on-one interviews and follow-up surveys, this study illuminates the current levels of gender inequality in these legacy industries; examines the relationships between

advance or are advancing positive change; pinpoints factors preventing gender diversity; and highlights best practices that companies and advocates are taking to address them.

Across the 14 legacy industries studied, women on average represent just over 20 percent of the employees hired by publicly listed companies, constitute only 18 percent of executive management, and hold a mere 13 percent of board seats. However, despite being substantially under-represented,

changes by:

� Contributing to profitability and

competitiveness: FPA analysis found that the companies with the highest percentage of women in management were, on average, 47 percent more

interviewed for this study detailed how they are

generating paths, advancing innovation in inertia-prone industries, advocating for products and practices that safeguard against human exposure to harm, and increasing transparency to build stakeholder trust.

� Reducing environmental impacts of business

practices and products: Companies with greater gender diversity on boards were found to have better environmental performance, and those with increased gender diversity over time also demonstrated higher likelihood of improvement in this area. For example, companies with improved gender diversity on boards from 2013 through 2018 were 60 percent more likely than those without it to reduce energy consumption. Mission-driven women are also

pressure and societal backlash against pollution

FP Analytics found that the

companies with the highest

percentage of women in

management were, on average, 47 percent more profitable than those with the lowest.

by advancing greener production processes and innovating environmentally sustainable alternatives.

� Pushing their organizations to proactively address

corporate social responsibility: FPA’s data analysis found a positive correlation between gender diversity on corporate boards and companies’ performances with

socially responsible practices within their industries by protecting safety and labor rights, integrating community development into business strategies, and building local capacity and empowering women.

� Creating inclusive corporate and industry

cultures:

discrimination and harassment limit the recruitment and retention of women and other minority groups in these industries. In response, women are creating more diverse and inclusive workplaces by leveraging leadership positions to create top-down change, and pushing

inclusivity through practical policies and initiatives.

Meanwhile, women are still facing a variety of barriers to entry and advancement in these industries, which limit their

they can be particularly severe in male-dominated legacy

WOMENASLEVERSOFCHANGE.COM

industries. However, many leading companies are striving

and support women’s contribution to business growth and

� Building the pipeline of female talent: The persistent gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and negative industry reputations contribute to

providing education, training, and job opportunities,

occupations. Additionally, companies are implementing inclusive hiring practices in order to proactively increase gender diversity within their organizations.

� Creating inclusive workplaces:

represent three main barriers to success that can drive

pay gaps and providing mentorship and sponsorship

equality with clear targets and explicit roadmaps.

� Connecting female professionals:

visibility within industries and to the public.

� Supporting female entrepreneurship: Female

even more so than in other business ecosystems, to

Public and private organizations are stepping

accelerator programs, but more needs to be done.

companies, investors, industry associations, and NGOs. It is

achieved. This study sheds new light on the concrete actions

WOMEN ASLEVERS OF

CHANGEUNLEASHING THE POWER OF WOMEN TO

TRANSFORM MALE-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES

WOMENASLEVERSOFCHANGE.COM

READ MOREAND DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT AT

This report was produced by FP Analytics with support from the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. FP Analytics is the independent research division of Foreign Policy. The content of this report does not represent the views of the editors of Foreign Policy magazine,

ForeignPolicy.com, or any other FP publication.

Learn more about how FP Analytics can enable your

organization to act strategically through data-driven insights at

ForeignPolicy.com/FP-Analytics

b y P H I L I P P E L E G R A I N

WILL THE CORONAVIRUS KILL GLOBALIZATION?The pandemic is legitimizing nationalists and turning their xenophobia into policy.

Illustration by JUSTIN METZ FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 23

U NTIL RECENTLY, MOST POLICYMAKERS AND INVESTORS remained complacent about the potential economic impact of the coronavirus crisis. Until late February, most wrongly assumed that it would have only a brief, limited, China- specific impact. Now they realize that it is generating a global shock, which may be sharp—but which most still expect to be short. But what if the economic disruption has an enduring impact? Could the coronavirus pandemic even be the nail in the coffin for the current era of globalization?

The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the downsides of extensive international integration while fanning fears of foreigners and providing legitimacy for national restrictions on global trade and flows of people.

All sorts of businesses have suddenly realized the risks of relying on complex global supply chains that are specific not just to China—but to particular places such as Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic. Chinese people—and now Italians, Iranians, Koreans, and others—have become widely seen as vectors of disease; senior Republican politicians in the United States have even labeled the disease the “Chi-nese coronavirus.” Meanwhile, governments of all stripes have rushed to impose travel bans, additional visa require-ments, and export restrictions. The travel ban on most arrivals from Europe that U.S. President Donald Trump announced on March 11 is particularly broad but far from unique. All of this is making economies more national and politics more nationalistic.

Much of this disruption may be temporary. But the corona-virus crisis is likely to have a lasting impact, especially when it reinforces other trends that are already undermining glo-balization. It may deal a blow to fragmented international supply chains, reduce the hypermobility of global business travelers, and provide political fodder for nationalists who favor greater protectionism and immigration controls.

The complex China-centered global supply chains on which so many Western companies have come to rely are

particularly at risk. The cost advantage of pro-ducing in China has eroded in recent years as the country has become richer and wages have soared. The risks were highlighted by Trump’s imposi-tion of punitive tariffs on imports from China in 2018 and 2019, leading businesses to scramble for alternatives.

While the January deal marked a fragile truce in the U.S.-China trade war, the perils of pro-ducing in China remain; both Democrats and Republicans increasingly view China as a long-term strategic rival that needs to be contained. And no sooner had the trade war abated than the coronavirus intervened. The extended shutdown of many Chinese factories has pushed exports down 17 percent in the first two months of the year compared with a year earlier, and it has dis-rupted the production of European cars, iPhones, and other consumer goods.

Inertia is a powerful thing. And there are still many advantages to producing in China, such as scale and efficient logistics. But the coronavirus crisis could mark a tipping point that prompts many businesses to remodel their supply chains and invest in more resilient and often more local patterns of production. One option is to shift and diversify operations across other Asian econo-mies, such as Vietnam or Indonesia. Another is to shorten supply chains, with U.S. companies moving production to Mexico and European ones to Eastern Europe or Turkey. A third is to invest in robots and 3D printing within advanced econ-omies, producing locally closer to consumers.

A second enduring consequence of the coro-navirus crisis may be reduced business travel. Technology gurus have long argued that videocon-ferencing and chat apps would eliminate the need for most business travel and allow many people to work from home more. Yet until the coronavi-rus crisis, business travel had continued growing, seemingly inexorably. Now, whether because of government bans, business decisions, or individ-ual caution, all but the most essential international travel has been canceled, and those who can work

from home are increasingly staying put. Thanks to this forced grounding, busi-nesses may discover that while face-to-face

THE COMPLEX CHINA�CENTERED GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS ON WHICH SO MANY WESTERN COMPANIES HAVE COME TO RELY ARE PARTICULARLY AT RISK.24 SPRING 2020

meetings are sometimes neces-sary, technological alternatives are often just fine—and also much less costly, time-consuming, and det-rimental to family life. And at a time of increasing concern about the impact of air-plane emissions on the climate, and with many businesses keen to highlight their commitment to environmental awareness and sustainability, there is both an environmental reason and an economic one why business travel may decline.

Perhaps most significantly, the coronavirus cri-sis plays into the hands of nationalists who favor greater immigration controls and protectionism.

The speed and scope of the virus’s spread across the globe have spotlighted people’s vulnerability to seemingly distant foreign threats. The corona-virus has not just spread to global hubs such as London and New York. It has also leaped directly to provincial cities such as Daegu, South Korea’s fourth-largest city; nursing homes in the suburbs of Seattle; and even small towns such as Castigli-one d’Adda (population: 4,600)—one of the 10 towns in Lombardy first quarantined by the Ital-ian government in February.

While internationally minded leaders have mouthed fine words about the need for cross-border cooperation in the face of an unprecedented com-mon threat, their actions have often belied this. Many ostensibly liberal governments have slapped restrictions on travel and trade more draconian than even Trump dared impose at the height of his conflict with China last year.

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s leftist prime minister, was quick to bar travelers from China who are not New Zealand citizens from entering the country. While such blanket bans may or may not be warranted on public health grounds, they provide greater legitimacy for those who view clos-ing the border as the solution to every ill.

Even within the European Union’s ostensibly bar-rier-free single market, France and Germany have banned the export of face masks; so much for the liberal internationalism and commitment to the EU of President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel. More shocking still is that none of the 26 other EU governments responded rapidly to

Italy’s urgent appeal for medical assistance—though China did. Granted, the coronavirus crisis has also exposed the hol-

lowness of nativists’ assertions that their anti-immigration and protectionist policies make people safer. Even though the nationalist coalition that runs Lombardy’s provincial government is led by Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party, it has not been successful in protecting the region from the coronavirus. Nor, for all his desire to decouple from China, has Trump been able to prevent the coronavirus from reach-ing the United States.

Trump himself may yet pay a price in November’s presiden-tial election for his insouciance and inept mismanagement of a public health crisis. But in general, the coronavirus crisis is a political gift for nativist nationalists and protectionists.

It has heightened perceptions that foreigners are a threat. It underscores that countries in crisis can’t always count on their neighbors and close allies for help. And with India limiting exports of life-saving drugs from its vast pharma-ceutical sector, it provides ammunition to those who wish to localize production of all sorts of products on national security grounds. More broadly, it may strengthen those who believe in strong government, prioritizing societal needs over individual freedom, and national action over international cooperation.

As a result, the coronavirus crisis threatens to usher in a less globalized world. Once the pandemic and panic abate, those who believe that openness to people and products from around the world is generally a good thing will need to make the case for it in fresh and persuasive ways.

PHILIPPE LEGRAIN (@plegrain) is the founder of the inter-national think tank OPEN, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute, and the author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them.

MANY OSTENSIBLY LIBERAL GOVERNMENTS HAVE SLAPPED RESTRICTIONS ON TRAVEL AND TRADE

MORE DRACONIAN THAN EVEN TRUMP DARED IMPOSE AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS CONFLICT

WITH CHINA LAST YEAR.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 25

THE UGLY END OF CHIMERICAThe coronavirus pandemic has turned a conscious uncoupling into a messy breakup.

b y O R V I L L E S C H E L L

WASHINGTON’S POLICY OF ENGAGEMENT TOWARD BEIJING has been embraced, with a few bumps along the way, by eight successive U.S. presidents—an incredible record of conti-nuity. The approach was born in 1972, when the fervently anti-communist President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, set off for Beijing to make a game-changing proposal: The United States and China should end their decades-long hostility by allying against the Soviet Union. As Nixon declared to Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose hand former U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to shake at a Geneva conference in 1954, “If our two people are enemies, the future of this world we share together is dark indeed.” He went on to insist that the two countries had “common interests” that tran-scended their differences and that “while we cannot close the gulf between us, we can try to bridge it so that we may be able to talk across it.” He ended grandiloquently: “The world watches … to see what we will do.”

The world is watching again, but most are expecting a very different outcome. Two giant powers that once seemed to be moving closer together are now tearing themselves away from each other—propelled by both politics and the impact of the global spread of the coronavirus. Decoupling was already underway, pushed by both Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rigid ideology and U.S. President Donald Trump’s nationalism. But as each country tries to blame the other for

Illustration by JUSTIN METZ26 SPRING 2020

the coronavirus crisis, as the world becomes starkly aware of supply chains and their vulnerability, and as the global order shifts tectonically, China and the United States are moving further and further apart.

UNTIL TRUMP CAME TO POWER, the world took Washington’s lead by expanding cooperation with China, especially in the years following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, when Deng Xiaoping committed his country to a bold new agenda of “reform and opening to the outside world.” Advocates of engagement hoped that this new policy would goad China into aligning itself with the existing liberal democratic rules-based world order so that over time it would also become more conver-gent with the interests of the United States.

Convinced of the seductive power of democracy and lulled by the promise of a seemingly ineluctable historical arc that bent toward greater openness, freedom, and justice, Amer-icans tended to view the prospect of such convergence as almost inevitable. After all, if China wanted to participate fully in the global marketplace, it had no choice but to play by the existing rules—and after the end of the Cold War, that meant America’s rules. So certain did the likelihood of greater convergence seem that there was even talk of a so-called “Chimerica” or forming a “Group of Two.” These promises of a less contentious future allowed differences between China’s values and political systems and those of the dem-ocratic world to be downplayed. Proponents of engagement with China emphasized its future evolution under the tonic effects of its putative economic reforms and cautioned that a tougher U.S. policy would only harm the country’s reformers.

A remarkable consensus began to form on the topic of U.S.-China cooperation, one that transcended ideological boundar-ies within the United States. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter, described as America’s first “human rights president,” ignored China’s manifold rights abuses and not only welcomed Deng to the White House but restored formal diplomatic relations with great fanfare. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush bent over backward to preserve friendly relations after the Tianan-men Square massacre by twice dispatching National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft to Beijing to beseech Deng not to let the hard-won U.S.-China relationship languish.

When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and engagement needed another rationale, President Bill Clinton galloped into the breech. After promising not to “coddle tyrants, from

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 27

Baghdad to Beijing,” and chastising his predecessor for conducting “business as usual with those who murdered freedom in Tiananmen Square,” he ended up embracing Chinese President Jiang Zemin, lobbying to extend “most favored nation” status to Beijing, and even helping to usher it into the World Trade Organization. Clinton was the first U.S. president to name this new policy “comprehensive engage-ment.” His hope was that once China got the needle of cap-italism in its arm, democracy would follow.

President Barack Obama continued to pursue this prom-ise, trying to breathe new life into the relationship by hav-ing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reassure Beijing that his administration would not allow sensitive questions like human rights to interfere with cooperation on climate change and economic crisis.

U.S. corporations and consumers both profited from these policies, even as the country was forced to compromise some of its democratic principles and tolerate a growing trade defi-cit. But China derived the largest benefit: Engagement neu-tralized the United States as an adversary at a time when it was most beneficial to Beijing. During those 30-plus years, China emerged out of its revolutionary cocoon, developed its fragile economy, laid down its modern infrastructure, and became an important part of global institutions. In a sheltered environment, one in which it was relieved of the threat of war with another big power or even serious hostil-ity, China not only survived but thrived.

WITH XI’S 2012 ENTHRONEMENT, however, the chemistry of this critical bilateral relationship began to change. Xi replaced his predecessor’s slogan of “peaceful rise” with his more bellig-erent “China Dream” and “China rejuvenation.” These ideas laid out a grand vision of a far more assertive and influential Chinese government at home and abroad. But Xi’s implacable assertiveness in foreign policy and his expanding domestic authoritarianism soon began alienating the United States as well as many other lesser trade partners, which found themselves caught in increasingly unequal, and sometimes even abusive, relationships they could not afford to vacate.

Xi’s ambitious new vision of a more aggressive and less

repentant China produced a host of reckless pol-icies: He occupied and then militarized the South China Sea; turned a generation of Hong Kongers against Beijing by gratuitously eroding the high level of autonomy they had been promised in 1997; antagonized Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, which the country had long administered in the East China Sea; rattled sabers at Taiwan so artlessly he alienated even the once reliably pro-Beijing Kuomintang party; and essentially turned Xinjiang into a giant detention camp.

The result has been not only tenser diplo-matic relations with Washington, a trade war, and a decoupling of elements of the two powers’ economies but a dangerous fraying of the fabric of transnational civil society cooperation and even a disruption of cultural exchanges. Put together, Xi provided Washington with all the ammunition it needed to reformulate its once forgiving stance. The result has been a far more unaccommodat-ing official posture supported by one of the most unanticipated coalitions in U.S. politics: a united congressional front of Republicans and Democrats who agree on little else. Without the catalytic ele-ment of Chinese political reform still in the mix, it is hard to imagine a Sino-American convergence regaining credibility anytime soon in the United States. And with divergence replacing conver-gence, engagement makes no sense.

But what was Xi’s logic in implementing pol-icies that rendered engagement so unworkable when they were working so well? What moved him to so alienate the United States when he did not need to? There are, of course, myriad specific rationales, but Xi has never articulated an over-arching explanation that speaks to China’s actual national self-interest. The most plausible might be the simplest: Muscular nationalism and overt pro-jections of power often play well at home among those ginned up on national pride.

But such indulgences are a luxury that can end up being costly in times of crisis. And the unex-pected arrival of the coronavirus pandemic has been just such a moment. Xi’s initial inability to manage the crisis has undermined both his air of personal invincibility and the most import-ant wellspring of the Chinese Communist Party’s

political legitimacy—namely, economic growth. The initial numbers out of China for the Jan-

uary-February period show a 20.5 percent drop in consumption and a 13.5 percent

drop in manufacturing year on year.

CHINA DERIVED THE LARGEST BENEFIT: ENGAGEMENT NEUTRALIZED THE UNITED STATES AS AN ADVERSARY AT A TIME WHEN IT WAS MOST BENEFICIAL TO BEIJING. 28 SPRING 2020

contacts and possibilities have been cut off. The U.S.-China relationship has found itself left floating in a gravity-free envi-ronment in which both Xi and Trump, because of their mis-handling of the viral challenge, are struggling to find their feet.

To be sure, if the virus is temporarily contained in China, as recent statistics on new cases seem to suggest, Xi may claim victory at home. And if U.S. efforts to control the out-break under Trump’s leadership continue to flounder, it will only add to Xi’s luster. But Xi has still suffered major repu-tational damage, especially facing criticism for suppressing the alarms raised by medical professionals in China that could have prevented the virus from spreading. Nor does it help him that U.S. leaders from Trump to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are determined to name it the “Chinese virus” to put responsibility where they say it belongs—and to distract from their own failures.

Win or lose, however, the pandemic has given Xi an excuse to both road-test and extend myriad new mechanisms of party and state control. New color-coded apps that desig-nate who can move where, temperature-checking police scanners, new kinds of mass mobilization tactics, and digi-tal censorship tools will allow the state to intrude even fur-ther into Chinese life in the future.

If the battle against the virus spins out of control again as he rushes workers back to assembly lines to rescue China’s economy, Xi will most certainly claim that the threats to the country’s survival and nationhood have now escalated to such a high threat level that an even more centralized, pow-erful, intolerant, and controlling government is the only way forward. Whatever happens to China’s epidemic, Beijing is likely to emerge from its viral trauma more autocratic, more pugnacious, and more inclined toward conflict with the lib-eral democratic rules-based order that many Americans still wistfully imagine their country commands.

ORVILLE SCHELL is the Arthur Ross director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.

Even as the country struggles back to its feet, markets in the rest of the world are going into lockdown.

DESPITE CHINESE EFFORTS TO RECLAIM THE CRISIS as a global propaganda victory—aided by the botched handling of the outbreak in the United States—the domestic blow dealt may be a mortal one, not to the party-state regime but to Xi himself, who has staked his credibility on the handling of the crisis. Unfortunately, the pandemic may also end up being the final coup de grâce of the rela-tively stable relationship China once enjoyed with the United States.

The Obama administration had already started reappraising the wisdom of trying to unilaterally keep engagement functional when along came Trump and his posse of China hawks (such as Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, and Michael Pillsbury) who had long warned that an increasingly aggres-sive, autocratic, and well-armed China was both inevitable and a threat to U.S. national interests.

Then, just as a debate over decoupling from China’s supply chains got rolling, the coronavi-rus reared its head. As airlines canceled flights, trade shows were postponed, tourism screeched to a halt, investment flows dried up, exports and imports plummeted, and high-tech exchanges were truncated, the debate was ripped out of the hands of policy wonks and thrust into the hands of the gods. By decoupling the United States and China almost overnight, the pandemic has mooted the debate and provided Trump and his hawks with exactly the kind of cosmic sanction they needed to put a final stake through the heart of engagement—and perhaps even the whole notion of globalization as a positive force.

Yet most Americans continue to want global-ization of some form—but perhaps with China playing far less of a dominant role. Now that U.S. businesses have turned skeptical of the old style of engagement, that policy has lost its last boost-ers. Even before the coronavirus crisis, compa-nies made more aware of the risk of having all their eggs in one basket by the trade war were diversifying manufacturing away from China and toward other developing economies like Vietnam. The pandemic may only accelerate that process.

The U.S. military, churches, media, think tanks, civil society, and even academia have since seen a sudden dearth of engagement advocates as old

XI’S INITIAL INABILITY TO MANAGE THE CRISIS HAS UNDERMINED BOTH HIS AIR OF PERSONAL

INVINCIBILITY AND THE MOST IMPORTANT WELLSPRING OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST

PARTY’S POLITICAL LEGITIMACY� NAMELY, ECONOMIC GROWTH.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 29

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FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 31Illustration by BEN FEARNLEY

HOW TO SAVE GLOBAL CAPITALISM FROM ITSELFDecentralizing decision-making can help left-behind regions get back on track.

b y R A G H U R A M R A J A N

A S NEW TECHNOLOGIES INTEGRATE MARKETS across the world, making them more competitive and more demanding, small manufacturing towns in industrial countries are bearing the brunt of the resulting economic disruption. They have been devastated as big employers move factories overseas or automate operations and reduce workforces. While this trend started decades ago, the volume and speed of expan-sion of Chinese manufacturing and exports in the past 20 years have significantly accelerated the process.

Historically, markets have created new jobs as they destroyed old ones. Unfortunately, the new jobs today are typically emerg-ing in the service sectors of flourishing megacities like London and New York, not in the small single-employer-dominated manufacturing towns where job losses have been most acute. And even among these jobs, the ones paying good salaries require higher education or cutting-edge skills. Naturally, those who have slipped from comfortable middle-class employment into the ranks of the precariat are angry, focusing their ire on an economic system they think has pummeled them unfairly.

In response, politicians across the political spectrum have proposed barriers to immigration, trade, and even doing business with certain foreign companies. A clamor for deglo-balization seems to have begun. And as a result, the world is becoming less open. Yet none of these responses will help against the inexorable march of automation.

Indeed, technologies already exist to replace even the low-skill service jobs that have emerged in urban areas, such as driving for Uber or putting together packages for Amazon with an earpiece telling you which shelf to go to next. Border walls do little when they are being undermined from the inside.

Moreover, aging industrial countries will need immigrants to supplement the shrinking workforce and to help pay for retiree entitlements. At present, there are three workers in Germany for every person over the age of 65. By 2035, the ratio will be 1-to-1, according to a 2018 study by the Bertels-mann Foundation. Without reforms, spending on older peo-ple will push the country’s public debt to over 200 percent of GDP by 2060. The foundation also found in a separate study in 2019 that Germany will need 260,000 new immigrants per year to meet its labor needs.

Aging countries will also need to export goods and services to younger populations elsewhere as their domestic demand shrinks. Allowing trade relationships to deteriorate, as some politicians advocate, is a form of self-harm whose effects will be even more pronounced in the future. And imposing bans on foreign corporations will lead to the dismantling of global supply chains, making products costlier everywhere.

Even as countries turn inward, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the very visible signs that climate change

has arrived suggest the world will require global cooperation to a degree it has never seen before. The further closing of the world would make this kind of cooperation virtually impossible. Fortu-nately, there are ways to restore faith in the liberal open market system that has brought the world so much prosperity—and many of the answers lie in reviving the very communities that have suffered under modern globalization.

Left-behind communities face a Catch-22. New jobs do not come to these areas because people do not have the required skills—and there is wide-spread poverty, substance abuse, and sometimes crime. Continuing economic devastation means these areas lack good local schools and training institutions that could help people get skills. These communities therefore need to work on a variety of fronts to revive themselves. Top-down solutions devised in remote capitals do little, however, to tackle the impediments to economic and social recovery. Locals typically know far more about what needs to be fixed—and they must be empow-ered to help their communities pull themselves up.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IS DISRUPTIVE, not just because it has destroyed old jobs but because it alters significantly the capabilities needed for new ones. A high school diploma is no longer enough for a good job. Advanced training in science, tech-nology, engineering, math, or highly developed interpersonal skills have become necessary to succeed in today’s world.

In her book Janesville: An American Story, Amy Goldstein describes how some of the workers laid off when the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, closed in 2009 did not even know how to use computers. These workers clearly needed an enormous amount of retraining to get similarly compensated jobs elsewhere. Older unemployed workers, held back by their more dated knowl-edge and tied down by family obligations, have always found it difficult to retool. Even younger workers find it difficult to upskill when the entire basis of economic activity disappears from their communities. Local institutions that can impart these skills are also dragged down as a community experiences job losses: Unemployment is just the beginning of a vicious cycle of decline.

32 SPRING 2020

In a 2017 study of areas in the United States that suffered large trade-related unemployment, pri-marily in states in the Midwest and Southeast, the economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gor-don Hanson found that as economic opportunity declines, social disintegration increases. Unem-ployed workers are unattractive long-term part-ners; consequently, there are fewer marriages, more divorces, and more single-parent families. Broken families, hopelessness, loneliness, and the associated despair often lead to alcoholism and drugs and sometimes crime. The opioid crisis was not caused solely by greedy doctors eager to overprescribe; economic decline contributed, too.

A declining community is unable to support local institutions like schools and community colleges. This is not just because of a shrinking tax base but because parents in stressed families cannot provide their children with a good learning environment at home, let alone help out in school activities, while the few distressed firms left in the community have little ability to provide mentor-ship, financial support, or apprenticeships to stu-dents attending community colleges.

As institutions deteriorate in quality, they can-not help unemployed workers retool—a necessity if new jobs are to be attracted to the community or if the workers are to find jobs elsewhere. Worse, with-out good schools, children have bleak prospects in a world where education has become so important. People who have the means to go leave for thriving areas elsewhere, taking their children with them. This secession of the successful leaves the rest fur-ther mired in poverty and unemployment.

A similar exodus has occurred in northern England, eastern Germany, and parts of Spain—places that once had an industrial base centered on small towns.

Workers in stressed communities could, in theory, move to richer cities to retrain and get good jobs. The reason many do not is because those places are expensive to live in and congestion is making them costlier (and environmentally less viable). Going back to school is challenging in the best of envi-ronments. In addition, if a worker has to move for a few years to an expensive city to get that school-ing, earning no income while supporting a family, it becomes more daunting still. So, many workers seem to cling on to nearby and progressively less well-

paid manufacturing jobs as long as they can. And when there are no jobs available, they drop out of the labor force entirely.

In the past, the United States was famous for easy mobility. “Go west, young man,” the New-York Tribune editor Horace Greeley supposedly exhorted when the West was still unset-tled. Later, the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South between the 1910s and 1960s, and its more mod-erate reversal after the civil rights movement, attested to the continuing importance of mobility in improving the lives of Americans. Most recently, mobility has been in decline. Cen-sus data suggests that even as late as 2000, 1 in 10 Americans made a significant move (out of their county) over the previ-ous five years. By 2010, only 1 in 15 were doing so.

Ambitious progressive solutions—for example, free col-lege education for all—are expensive and largely ineffective in helping people in these left-behind places. How do you get into college when you are competing with middle-class kids who went to good public schools in prosperous cities? And even if you are accepted, how do you benefit from college when your schooling has been grossly inadequate? Even today, far too many students drop out of college, not just because of the high fees but because they are unprepared for it.

In a world with limited mobility, policies ought to be directed at reversing these vicious cycles, resurrecting communities wher-ever possible so that there are more jobs there and capability- creating institutions like schools and community colleges thrive again. Fortunately, technological change, which created the imbalances in the first place, can be instrumental in the resurrection, helping to build a more sustainable capitalism.

LOCATION�BASED POLICIES such as the U.S. government’s “oppor-tunity zone” tax incentives for job-creating investment attempt to address the problem of stressed communities more directly. However, such centrally determined proposals can flounder on the hard-to-map shoals of local conditions.

Amazon’s decision to build a second headquarters across the river from midtown Manhattan in Long Island City, Queens, promising 25,000 jobs paying an annual average

LOCALS TYPICALLY KNOW FAR MORE ABOUT WHAT NEEDS TO BE FIXED�AND THEY

MUST BE EMPOWERED TO HELP THEIR COMMUNITIES PULL

THEMSELVES UP.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 33

and regional governments in setting indirect taxes.In turn, as globalization has accelerated in

recent decades, national governments across the world have given up some of their powers to international bodies and treaties. For example, the European Commission limits the regulatory discretion of individual member states so that firms face similar harmonized regulatory envi-ronments across the union.

While some harmonization is beneficial, cen-tralization—indeed globalization—of governance has obtained a momentum of its own. National and international administrators, egged on by powerful large firms that want seamless borders, find restraint difficult. Bank regulators meet in Basel, Switzerland, to set capital requirements and other regulations for the entire globe, argu-ing that there would otherwise be a regulatory race to the bottom.

The recently negotiated United States-Mexico- Canada Agreement (the successor to the North American Free Trade Agreement) mandates that Mexico ensure internet companies are not liable for content their users post even though this is still being democratically debated in the United States. Top-down imposition is even more com-mon within countries. If a regional or national gov-ernment supplements a community’s resources, its administrators want to impose standards so that their support is not wasted. Yet these often leave little agency for community members and are insensitive to community views or needs. The desire to constrain localities is especially strong in countries where administrators believe that left to their own devices, communities will invariably become corrupt, sectarian, or reactionary.

The net effect has been a steady disempower-ment of local, and even national, government. And with local governments disempowered, it is hardly surprising that voters have directed their anger at distant authorities and embraced popu-lists closer to home. The Brexit slogan that reso-nated in the small devastated towns of northern England was “Take back control!”—not just from Brussels but also from London. It was a clear indi-cation that people wanted more democratic con-trol over their futures as they reacted to the market

forces pummeling them.If governments want to preserve the global integration of markets, they may have to

give up the hyperintegration of gov-ernance. They must be much more

salary of at least $150,000, seemed the ideal outcome of such tax incentives. Yet local politicians rejected it. Too few in the community may have had the skills to get the jobs, and the influx of skilled outsiders could have raised rents and property taxes, pushing out longtime residents. Clearly, a proposal better tailored to the community’s needs could have persuaded it, but because the decision was negotiated by high-ranking company and city officials without really taking the community into confidence, these alternatives were left unexplored. Community leaders could only pro-test against the decision, not shape it.

At one level, this is not surprising. As markets have inte-grated, first spanning regions, then countries, and then the world, the power to make decisions has also moved steadily away from local political entities and toward national and inter-national structures. Take, for instance, support for the unem-ployed. In many industrial countries in the 19th century, this used to be provided by the local parish. Community solidarity, coupled with local knowledge and information, made it work—the community helped families that had fallen on hard times.

However, as markets became more integrated and reces-sions became deeper and more long-lasting, communities were overwhelmed. Only regional or national governments had the resources to provide support. Naturally, if they were called on to provide support periodically, they wanted the power to set the rules and even take over the entire function. Today, across the industrial world, unemployment insurance is typically provided by the central or regional government, with local community-based support, including from churches and charities, kicking in only when official support is exhausted.

Similarly, as interregional trade increased within a coun-try, firms pressed for seamless regional borders and com-mon national regulation and taxation—after all, a financial firm will find it harder to manage if each locality it operates in regulates compensation, liquidity, and minimum cap-ital differently, while an automaker would want common nationwide emission requirements.

Through much of the 20th century, the governments of industrial countries centralized power. Emerging markets are now doing so too, with India recently enacting a national goods and services tax that eliminates the discretion of municipalities

IF GOVERNMENTS WANT TO PRESERVE THE GLOBAL INTEGRATION OF MARKETS, THEY MAY HAVE TO GIVE UP THE HYPERINTEGRATION OF GOVERNANCE.34 SPRING 2020

careful about new international agreements that bind countries unnecessarily, especially if they go way beyond low tariffs. The goal should be to bring more powers back to the country level, provided global markets remain open.

Yet the devolution of power cannot stop at the national level. Capitals must devolve power and funding further to the local level so that communi-ties can reinstill a sense of engagement and iden-tity in their members. This is, of course, not to say that global climate change should be tackled only at the community level (though communities can do their bit) or that countries should pass on build-ing national infrastructure.

Delegation should be guided by the principle of subsidiarity, which requires decisions to be taken by the lowest level capable of taking them effec-tively. So, for instance, communities will clearly not decide their own auto emission standards. That should be a national decision. But what businesses will be licensed to operate locally and choices over minimum wages, qualifications, operating hours, and benefits (obviously all above the national min-imums) should be a community decision.

Switzerland is a small country with extreme pop-ulation diversity. (It has four national languages, and 25 percent of the population is foreign.) How-ever, it functions efficiently precisely because so many decisions are decentralized to its 26 cantons and further to the thousands of municipalities. Sub-sidiarity guides education decisions; the federal gov-ernment is responsible for institutes of technology, the cantons for high schools, and the municipalities for primary schools and kindergarten.

Devolution of powers will not be easy, especially since strong interests—international bureaucra-cies, administrators and politicians in the national capital, and top management in large firms—pre-fer centralization. However, sensible devolution on issues such as education, business regulation, local infrastructure, and funding is critical to com-munity revival.

IF SMALLER TOWNS AND SEMIURBAN AREAS depend only on local demand, there won’t be many new jobs. However, if the menu includes national or global demand, there are plenty of possibilities. Technol-ogy helps connect the local to national and inter-national markets; online platforms allow small enterprises to advertise niche products across the world, as Adam Davidson points out in his

book The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century, enabling specialized potential buyers to find them. For instance, the Wengerds, an Amish family in Ohio, have built a flourishing business selling high-tech horse-drawn farm equipment—a niche market if ever there was one. The buyers? Other Amish farms across the United States, of course.

Such enterprises need continued easy access to national or global networks. Online platforms like Amazon and Ali-baba provide such access today but are also gaining in mar-ket power. Clearly, small entrepreneurs can share some of their profits with the platform, but when platforms quickly replicate a successful seller’s products and sell them under their own brand, while charging high fees off of others, they make it much less attractive for such enterprises to start up. To make the platform space more competitive and friendly to small entrepreneurs, antitrust authorities should be vig-ilant. Instead of using old-style remedies like breaking up platforms, which will reduce access to global markets, they should instead preserve these networks but make access easier, both for clients and for competitors.

For instance, mandating interoperability across networks—in the same way as a phone on a T-Mobile network can reach a customer on the AT&T network—will allow small networks to challenge large ones, keeping them competitive. Faced with breakup or interoperability, giants like Amazon might well choose the latter. Allowing clients to own their data and to share them with other platforms—as the European Union is in the process of doing in financial services—will also keep clients from getting tied to a provider.

Successful small enterprises can help lift a sinking commu-nity, not just by providing jobs and an example but because they belong fully within the community and can help sup-port its activities. In the past, large corporations also provided such help. They found it hard to manage far-flung outposts, so local management was given substantial autonomy, and they worked with community leadership on issues of mutual interest. However, as improvements in communications tech-nology have allowed headquarters today to respond quickly to local developments, more staff resources have moved to the headquarters in the big cities, where they can service corporate units all across the country more efficiently. Each local unit is left with far less autonomy.

DECISIONS SHOULD BE TAKEN BY THE LOWEST LEVEL CAPABLE OF

TAKING THEM EFFECTIVELY.

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Rather than using antitrust law to keep firms small, which could be a disservice to consumers given the significant scale of production today, it would be better if large cor-porations decentralized their corporate social responsibil-ity activities. These should be more focused in left-behind communities where they have a significant presence and can aid community revival. Even a firm like Walmart, often accused of eroding a community’s economic basis, is start-ing to push local engagement through (still small) initiatives like Walmart Rise, which gives each Walmart store a small amount to spend on community engagement.

Community revival, of course, requires more than decen-tralization of the relevant government and corporate activ-ities. Left-behind communities in industrial countries face similar challenges to those historically found in underdevel-oped countries, but they have an important advantage. They are located in rich countries, which already have thriving economies and strong legal, regulatory, and business insti-tutions. The easiest way to generate economic activity is to restore community links to the thriving national and global economies so they can piggyback on broader growth. While there is no magic formula, four elements that appear repeat-edly in successful revival efforts are leadership, engagement, infrastructure, and funding.

Finding effective leaders is difficult because existing lead-ership is often paralyzed and many capable people have left. Indeed, one of the main arguments against devolv-ing power is that the available local decision-makers are incompetent and corrupt.

Yet, even in seemingly hopeless situations, local leadership can emerge. Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood was a war zone in the late 1980s; 21 different gangs fought each other on a 2-mile stretch of the main thoroughfare, with horrific death rates. Pilsen needed to bring crime down to have any hope of revival. In Pilsen, new leadership emerged from desperation. When a young man was shot across the street from a local church and the pastor asked his congregation how long they could see it as someone else’s problem, a group of young commu-nity members stepped up. They chose one of their own, Raul Raymundo, to lead the suitably named Resurrection Project, and three decades later, he is still there, having attracted hun-dreds of millions of dollars of investment from government, business, and philanthropic interests into his community.

Such communities need creative ways to draw able people back and increase the talent pool from which such leaders can

emerge. Taxes could be reduced for those who live in stressed communities; the college loans of those who return to stressed communities for a number of years could be partly forgiven so that college becomes a route to training locals, not just a means of escape for the talented; and capable immigrants could be given residence visas if they agree to stay in communities that need them.

Pilsen’s leaders engaged the community to lobby the city licensing authorities to close down seedy bars where criminals congregated. They involved local businesses in creating training opportu-nities for youth as an alternative to crime. They encouraged locals to report criminal incidents to the police collectively so that gangs could not tar-get individual informants and to come out on the streets after criminal incidents. As Pilsen crowded out crime, businesses started crowding in. While Pilsen is far from rich today, many residents have decent livelihoods, the community is much safer, its schools are better, and its children have a future.

Leaders can draw communities into focal proj-ects, such as reducing crime in Pilsen. They can create focal meeting points. A vacant plot of land can become a communal garden, a volleyball court, or in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a public park such as the Gathering Place, which has done much to enliven the local community and attract tour-ist interest with landscapes of fantasy and play.

New technologies like social media help hold leaders accountable. An engaged community can use information technology to monitor its offi-cials, thus curtailing corruption and laziness. For instance, the SeeClickFix app allows residents in Chicago to photograph and upload the location of a pothole, graffiti, or an abandoned car to the municipality website. It stays there until an offi-cial fixes the problem.

Infrastructure is also important. New physical infrastructure, such as a refurbished downtown, an accessible waterfront, or inviting new trails, can make a community attractive to businesses and young skilled workers. Physical connectivity to eco-nomic hot spots helps. The Conservative govern-ment in the United Kingdom plans to spend billions of dollars to link hollowed-out towns through road and rail with flourishing regional centers like Man-chester. This shows that not every decision needs to be local but that taking local needs into account

when reconfiguring infrastructure is vital and can be economically transformative.

For instance, a 2018 study by the Federal

EVEN IN SEEMINGLY HOPELESS SITUATIONS, LOCAL LEADERSHIP CAN EMERGE.36 SPRING 2020

Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that in north-eastern Pennsylvania, 88 percent of low-income worker commutes took over an hour, even though 73 percent of suitable jobs were within a 15-minute walk of a bus stop. Why? Because most regional transit systems first take you to a central hub and then back to where you need to go. More appropri-ate bus routes linking job-heavy locations directly with worker-heavy residential areas would help low-income workers get to work quickly, which is key to their dealing with recurring personal emer-gencies and retaining jobs.

Local financial infrastructure is also crucial. For instance, in 2013 Pilsen’s main community bank was at risk of failing. At the time, nearly 30 per-cent of the bank’s mortgages were delinquent, and many local borrowers would have faced eviction if the bank had closed down or been sold. Vacancies would have pushed house prices down and brought crime back. Together with philanthropic support, the community rescued the bank. Its delinquen-cies are now down to 4 percent of its mortgage portfolio because it worked with its borrowers and nursed bad loans back to health.

Finally, digital infrastructure is critical for eco-nomic inclusion. Many areas in wealthy coun-tries like Germany and the United States still do not have access to digital broadband. This has to be remedied if economic activity is going to be better distributed geographically than it is today. Better virtual connectivity will also be environ-mentally friendlier because not everyone will need to move to megacities.

Funding is also important. Communities in eco-nomic decline may not have much ability to raise new taxes. The problem is that much financial sup-port from the regional or national government, or from bodies like the EU or the World Bank, comes with significant strings attached on how it must be used. To facilitate local input into spending deci-sions, it is better that money come in the form of government grants without strings attached—also known as block grants—or from private philan-thropies free from spending constraints.

The community can still be held to performance standards—again, technology can be used to mon-itor performance—but it should have operational freedom to decide what to spend on. The current U.S. administration’s proposal for tax-incentivized investments into “opportunity zones” could work if investments are designed in cooperation with community leadership to address actual needs.

Without any community involvement, however, they may just be an ineffective tax windfall to the wealthy.

A far-sighted community will take ownership of local assets at the outset when they are cheap so it can then obtain greater funding resources as the community revives and local assets become more valuable. In the 1990s, Copenhagen’s city gov-ernment sold land to private developers and used the pro-ceeds to build out a metro system. This increased the value of the land the municipal government still owned near the new metro line, which was then sold to expand the metro further. The value obtained from such community-owned assets can also be used to help community residents who do not own property but are in danger of being pushed out by the rise in local rents.

MANY OF THESE POLICIES CAN ALSO HELP residents of historically disadvantaged communities, usually minorities, in urban areas. Healthy local communities are not just necessary to help individuals get good jobs; they can also help mitigate conflict as people from different cultures come together in increasingly ethnically mixed industrialized countries. Pop-ulist nationalists inflame majority groups with fears that their culture will be diluted. They want the majority culture to be imposed throughout the nation, even while immigra-tion is restricted severely so that their culture is not diluted.

There is an alternative embraced by countries like Canada: to celebrate culture within community rather than attempt-ing an impossible national homogeneity. Some communities will choose monoculture, while others will choose multicul-tural lifestyles. Any choice should be respected so long as everyone is united by shared national values and no one is deliberately excluded. The national government can help, preventing rejuvenated communities from becoming segre-gated by enforcing laws against discrimination.

Ideally, the community should have boundaries, giving its people a sense of empowerment and belonging, but keep them porous enough that goods, services, and people can flow freely across them. An inclusive localism may, some-what paradoxically, be the best answer to the challenges from technological change and globalization.

Sustainable capitalism is not just about competitive mar-kets. It is also about the societal underpinnings that allow most people to benefit from them and give the markets their democratic support. Rather than closing borders and aban-doning capitalism, the leaders of the industrialized world must fix capitalism—by starting with the communities it has left behind.

RAGHURAM RAJAN is a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of The Third Pillar.

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J UST A FEW DAYS AFTER THE UNITED KINGDOM LEFT the Euro-pean Union on Jan. 31, Boris Johnson traveled across the Thames to the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich to give a speech outlining the kind of country he as prime minister now hoped to build.

Hair typically tousled, Johnson began by pointing up at James Thornhill’s vast ceiling painting titled “The Triumph of Peace and Liberty Over Tyranny.” Britain’s departure, he sug-gested, could be a moment of liberation and transformation. An island long shackled by continental constraints would fly like Superman, Johnson opined, “ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion” for the benefits of free trade and charting your own national path.

Brexit backers hope to take back control of a country whose 2016 referendum realized a vote to reject not just the European Union but also a model of globalization favoring prosperous urbanites over poorer, rural communities. Even before the new divisions and shutdowns brought about by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Johnson was leading the world’s most radical experiment in deglobalization: a bloody-minded push to overturn decades of conventional wisdom that midsize nations must band together, both to reap the rewards of trade and solve problems that each

BRITAIN’S POST�BREXIT IDENTITY CRISISBoris Johnson has contradictory ideas for his country’s future—and no clear paths for getting there.

b y J A M E S C R A B T R E E

Illustration by BRIAN STAUFFER

would find too large to fix on its own.If it works, Brexit will act as a rebuke to those

globalists who argue that economic prosperity and democratic sovereignty are hard to reconcile. Other nations may follow suit, rejecting the strictures of multilateralism for bold new eras of national autonomy. But that is a big if, given Brexit also leaves Britain facing awkward questions not just about the kind of trade deal Johnson may strike with the EU but also about the kind of country Britain aspires to become.

Many arguments for Brexit were based on mis-understandings—perhaps willful, perhaps not—of globalization itself and thus the way Britain’s ties with Europe are now likely to be recast. John-son wants to believe that Britain’s future can be simultaneously more open to the world and more in control of its political destiny. But his policies already look incoherent. Britain’s tight timetable to strike a deal this year has been severely com-plicated because of its pandemic response. Even putting that aside, Johnson is balancing conflict-ing future visions of a free trading, low-regulation “Singapore-on-Thames” with more statist pledges to reduce yawning inequalities. More to the point, he faces one ultimate Brexit conundrum—namely that the act of departure itself could worsen the very underlying divisions that pushed his coun-try to leave in the first place.

BRITAIN’S REFERENDUM VOTE was a howl of frustra-tion, but it contained an undeniable logic. Just before the 2016 vote, Michael Gove, a Johnson ally, famously claimed that Britain had “had enough of experts”—meaning the ranks of economists who predicted calamity were the U.K. to leave. “The people who are backing the Remain campaign are people who have done very well, thank you, out of the European Union,” Gove said. Leave support-ers, he added, had not.

Gove had a point. Decades of ever closer ties helped boost Britain’s economy. In 1992, the U.K. signed the Maastricht Treaty, which accelerated European economic integration by handing more powers to Brussels, including expanded cooper-ation on criminal justice and foreign policy, and laying the groundwork for the creation of the euro. At that time, British GDP per capita was nearly a fifth below that of France. Twenty-five years later, Britain had pulled ahead.

Britain’s growth was uneven, however. London

38 SPRING 2020

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 39

boomed, as did other major cities. Decaying industrial regions and hardscrabble coastal towns did not. Taken as a whole, British household incomes remain well below their level prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Homeowners in desirable areas have enjoyed a prolonged boom but only at the cost of ever higher inequality among regions. During the 2010s, house prices in London, for instance, increased twice as fast as they did in the rest of Britain.

It was voters from those left-behind areas, including small post-industrial towns in northern England like Con-sett and Wigan, that propelled Johnson back to power in Britain’s recent election. The Conservative leader now heads an ungainly coalition, bringing together genteel and tradi-tionally Tory suburbs in southern England with once solidly socialist northern cities. In what amounts to a realignment of British politics around a Remain-Leave axis, Johnson united two groups that voted strongly to leave: older, affluent social conservatives on the one hand and the lower-skilled working classes that used to back the opposition Labour Party on the other.

Keeping this grouping together is now one of Johnson’s trickier political challenges. Much more difficult, though, will be finding answers to the questions Brexit posed about the failures of Britain’s economic model.

Globalization tends to be portrayed as a uniform process, where all nations must follow similar rules. But in truth each country globalizes in its own peculiar way, as industries with competitive advantages duke it out on the world stage. That process helped Britain become the world’s second largest exporter of services, behind only the United States. London’s status as a European and global financial center was a big part of this. But British firms also thrive in trading services such as advertising and management consulting, telecom-munications, information technology, and business. U.K. services exports are worth almost twice as much as its goods exports, according to McKinsey, a consultancy.

Globalization’s advances also helped some British man-ufacturers recover from the traumas of Thatcherism—the free market, small-government policies of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Policies promoting dereg-ulation and competition during the 1980s pushed U.K. manufacturing down from about a quarter of GDP to less

than a 10th today. Yet advanced manufacturing revived during the 1990s and 2000s, notably in areas like car-making, where companies such as Honda and Nissan built huge factories to export cars to Europe. Aircraft parts and pharmaceuti-cals did well too as Britain became a base from which international investors could access the EU’s so-called frictionless single market.

Yet these British successes came at a cost, not least a pronounced hourglass-shaped labor market with a squeezed middle class. The era of hyper-globalization created plenty of good jobs at the top in both services and advanced manufactur-ing. Britain’s flexible labor market also churned out poorly paying low-skilled jobs at the bottom, leaving millions of workers barely out of poverty. But middle-skilled jobs, such as factory machin-ists, were caught in the middle, falling by around a 10th in the decade before the 2008 financial crisis.

JOHNSON’S BREXIT PROMISE IS THAT BRITAIN can now continue these positive economic trends in ser-vices and advanced manufacturing while revers-ing the economic divisions that came alongside them. To do this, he says he wants a post-Brexit “Canada-style” trade deal with the EU, similar to the one Canada signed in 2016. This appeals to the British public, who are well-disposed toward Canada. It appeals to Johnson too, given it would allow regulatory “divergence,” meaning Britain once again would set its own rules in areas like environmental and labor standards.

Much of the recent Brexit debate has focused on how “soft” or “hard” a future EU trading rela-tionship would be. A Canada-style deal is undeni-ably hard, involving the reintroduction of customs checks and possibly tariffs. Negotiating such a deal will not be easy: Canada’s took seven years, a feat Britain now hopes to achieve in less than one, according to Johnson’s self-imposed deadline. Set against the backdrop of the coronavirus cri-sis, with both British and European political elites overwhelmingly preoccupied with outbreak man-agement, the odds of meeting this timetable look worse than ever.

Of the plausible deals Britain could have struck, Johnson’s also threatens the greatest disrup-

tion to trading patterns, short of crashing out of the EU entirely. A Canada-style deal

will leave Britain’s economy 3.5 percent smaller in a decade, according to the

JOHNSON WANTS TO BELIEVE THAT BRITAIN’S FUTURE CAN BE SIMULTANEOUSLY MORE OPEN TO THE WORLD AND MORE IN CONTROL OF ITS POLITICAL DESTINY. 40 SPRING 2020

London-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research—a decline that amounts to $90 billion, or about $1,100 per person per year forever.

Yet Johnson’s true Brexit conundrum is that these new frictions will hit some sectors harder than others. As the author and economist Martin Sandbu argued: “A hard Brexit … stands to exac-erbate the polarising characteristics of the UK’s existing economic model and harshen the social tensions to which it has given rise.”

How might this happen? A hard Brexit will hurt British-based manufacturers that use the U.K. as a base from which to plug into European supply chains, like Nissan or Jaguar Land Rover, owned by India’s Tata Motors. These companies rely on sending parts and widgets back and forth across Europe’s borders. Intermediate goods traded with Europe alone now make up roughly a quarter of Brit-ain’s imports and exports, according to McKinsey.

When we speak of globalization, this is what we mean: components flying between countries via the webs of production that trade economists call “global value chains,” often based on mod-els of “just in time” delivery. In this sense, much of Britain’s recent globalization is actually best understood as a process of Europeanization. A hard Brexit will undo much of this, adding costs to companies via trade barriers and delays through new custom checks.

Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, tried to avoid this problem with her “Chequers” deal—named after the country residence of sitting Brit-ish prime ministers—which preserved frictionless trade in goods. Johnson rejected this because it meant keeping common EU rules, in effect choos-ing to sacrifice car- and drugmakers on the altar of sovereignty. Nor are U.K.-based manufacturers likely to be able to replace lost EU business. The cost of moving goods over long distances remains a powerful force shaping trade patterns. Apple can ship lightweight electronics from factories in China, but in heavier industries like auto and avia-tion, production tends to be regional, for instance in North America or East Asia, rather than truly global. Few British industrial manufacturing firms are likely to replace contracts lost in France or Germany with others in South Korea or Thailand.

Brexit will hit trade in services too. More than half of exported U.K. services end up in Europe, where they will lose access to the single market, for instance when the city of London loses the so-called “passporting” rights that let banks sell services into

the single market without needing extra licenses. Global finan-cial centers grow by servicing regional markets, as New York does for the United States or Hong Kong for China, so Lon-don will suffer as it distances itself from its European base as banks and brokerages shift divisions to Frankfurt or Dublin.

Services are still likely to be more resilient than manufac-turing, however. Trade in services is still growing strongly around the world, in contrast to the exchange of goods, which is stagnant or declining. If Britain manages to sign post-Brexit trade deals with countries like the United States and Japan, it is likely to seek favorable conditions for its services industries. Services trade is also less troubled by problems of distance, meaning British banks or consultants are more likely than manufacturers to be able to replace lost Euro-pean business elsewhere in the world, for instance in Asia.

Not all British factories will move: Nissan, which operates Britain’s largest car factory in the northern city of Sunderland, recently pledged prior to the coronavirus crisis to stay even under a hard Brexit scenario, although whether this hope remains in place for Nissan and other major international manufacturers now depends on the severity of the coming economic downturn and potentially government support to offset huge falls in demand. Falls in the value of sterling prior to the crisis helped workers and factories regain lost competitiveness, although again these effects have now been swamped by the economic turbulence brought on by the pandemic. Still, when the coronavirus crisis subsides, thou-sands of manufacturing jobs, built up slowly over decades, are likely to shift gradually (or potentially at an accelerated rate due to the crisis) to countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, where access to Europe is easier. Foreigners who might once have brought new factories to Britain will head to Europe too, just as Elon Musk recently began a new Tesla Gigafactory in Germany. Britain, he said, was too risky.

Just a fraction of Britain’s manufacturing employment comes via high-quality exporters. Even so, those jobs are often to be found in left-behind regions, while services jobs in banks or advertising agencies are overwhelming concen-trated in cities. Manufacturing jobs have knock-on effects too, supporting other employment, suggested Richard Baldwin,

FEW BRITISH INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING FIRMS ARE LIKELY TO REPLACE

CONTRACTS LOST IN FRANCE OR GERMANY WITH OTHERS IN

SOUTH KOREA OR THAILAND.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 41

a trade economist known for his work on global value chains. “If you lose a few hundred jobs in London, no one notices,” he said. “But if you lose a few hundred of these good jobs in left-behind areas, the secondary effects can be devastating.”

THIS, THEN, IS JOHNSON’S BREXIT DILEMMA, namely that by pursu-ing a hard Brexit, he threatens to damage a manufacturing sector that has been a rare bright spot in Britain’s struggling regions. Two contradictory visions of Britain’s future have emerged to attempt to overcome this dilemma.

The first is “Singapore-on-Thames,” or, to its more boisterous backers, “Singapore-on-steroids”—a vision of an ultra-com-petitive island of rock-bottom taxes and lax rules, which would tempt European companies to shift business to the U.K. in search of easier regulation or indeed to relocate entirely.

There were elements of this vision in Johnson’s Greenwich speech, in which he painted himself as that most unusual of animals: an ardently free-trading populist, rather than the protectionist variety represented by U.S. President Donald Trump. Yet Britain’s Singaporean future remains unlikely for three reasons, the first being its misunderstanding of the country on which it is based. Singapore is undeniably a low-tax, competitive economy. But rather than Singapore being a haven for deregulation, its economic management is inter-ventionist, with a state that owns stakes in almost everything, including telecom providers and airlines. Rather than under-cutting regional rivals, Singapore prospered by offering rela-tively high regulatory and legal standards, winning investment from poorer neighbors like India, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

Then there is the second matter: Europe. Anxious about Britain’s Singaporean instincts, the EU plans to make a “level playing field”—meaning comparable social and environmen-tal standards —central to its Brexit negotiations. Britain can push for regulatory divergence if it wants. But Europe can then respond by raising trade barriers or with retaliatory tar-iffs, in effect negating any benefit the U.K. might gain from undercutting European rules.

The final barrier to Singapore-on-Thames comes via the British public. The U.K. already has one of Europe’s most deregulated labor markets. Polls show scant support for lowering standards further, for instance by cutting the

minimum wage or lowering environmental and food safety rules. The long-term public response to the coronavirus is certain to play into this too, by radically expanding the scope of state inter-vention in the economy and increasing public demand for higher spending in core public ser-vices, especially health care.

Indeed, it is mostly for these reasons that John-son had begun prior to the pandemic to push a sec-ond post-Brexit strategy, which was far more statist and populist and designed to appeal to Brexit-back-ing voters in poorer regions. Some of this effort was symbolic, including mooted plans to relocate Britain’s upper house of Parliament, the House of Lords, to the north of England. But there were also serious proposals to rejuvenate declining northern areas via a new $100 billion infrastructure spending pledge and to build a long-promised high-speed rail line between London and Manchester, all funded by higher public borrowing.

More radical still were the ideas of Dominic Cum-mings, a Brexit architect and Johnson’s quixotic political advisor, to shake up the British state. Cum-mings attracted derision with a job advert inviting “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” to apply to join his Downing Street team. He planned to lead a group of self-styled insurgents at the heart of gov-ernment, launching bold forays to scrap some state bodies and build others in their place, for instance a U.K. version of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is responsible for develop-ing cutting-edge military technology.

The idea here, attractive on its face, is that Brit-ain can innovate its way into a new period of pros-perity. Government economic measures unveiled in response to the pandemic may create further space for radical ideas too. Cummings imagines a radically different education system as part of this, with a focus on science, creativity, and problem solving. Britain’s recent decision to defy Trump and permit the Chinese firm Huawei to play a part in its future 5G rollout was part of this picture too, as Johnson and Cummings prioritized next-gen-eration telecom infrastructure over favorable ties with the United States.

Yet this second approach also comes with prob-lems. Cummings’s plans are eye-catching, but they

require deft state direction that would be highly unusual in recent British history. Johnson will

have less money to spend either way, given the damage the coronavirus response is

likely to do to national finances.

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Politically, Johnson has the rest of his coalition to think about, which includes plenty of traditional Tories keen on low taxes and worried about expen-sive white elephant infrastructure schemes. Even if they can be convinced, in part by rebranding these plans as pandemic stimulus measures, Britain’s underlying economic structure has proved sur-prisingly durable, from its flexible labor market to its deep regional inequalities and low investment levels. As the economist Diane Coyle has argued, even the sums Johnson presently plans to spend are nowhere close to what would be needed to shift this pattern fundamentally.

BRITAIN’S POST�BREXIT POSITION IS FAR FROM HOPELESS. Predictions from prominent Remainers that leav-ing would plunge the U.K. into recession have not come to pass, even if the pandemic brought this about anyway. Britain’s growth rate has been well above those of Germany and France over recent years. The U.K. is likely to remain one of the world’s 10 largest—and most competitive—economies for many decades.

Over time Britain will adjust to its new circum-stances too. The Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik talks about the “political trilemma” of globalization, in which deep global integration is incompatible with both national sovereignty and democratic accountability. Nations, he suggests, must pick two of these three things. Britain has decided to make its own rules and run its own insti-tutions but at the cost of forgoing the economic benefits that hyperglobalization often brings.

Johnson rejects this trilemma, claiming Britain can now become more economically open and more in control of its own destiny. More circum-spect Brexit backers think leaving the EU might create a new Britain that grows more slowly but is more democratic and equal. Such a bargain, they think, is probably worth having, so long as it begins to heal some of the wounds that caused Brexit in the first place.

The coronavirus outbreak will change this trajec-tory in complex but significant ways. In the face of the worst global public health crisis in a generation, Britain’s public might rediscover some affection for multilateralism, especially after a crisis that has seen precious little international coordination. But it is of course sadly possible that, as the pandemic deepens, Britain’s ties with Europe will be strained further, making Brexit negotiations far more difficult.

In the long run, there are many ways in which Brexit could turn out to be a good deal. The EU as an institution may prosper over the coming decade. But if it does not, Britain’s decision to leave will seem fortuitous. More to the point, while there is no single template for national eco-nomic development, countries that control what Rodrik dubs their own “policy space” are often better able to figure out new routes to prosperity, as South Korea and Singapore have done. This is a tough process with few guarantees of success. But Britain at least has the potential to become a leader in the kinds of industries that will underpin future global growth, from renewable energy and artificial intel-ligence to online education.

Yet even this cautiously optimistic vision comes with risks, namely that a process promised as a cure to globalization’s ills may still end up worsening the disease. Brexit is described as a divorce for good reason. If globalization was the heady, romantic rush of economic integration, then deglobaliza-tion is the slow, awkward, and painful unpicking of decades of trading relationships. Almost every respectable estimate suggests this will leave Britain poorer outside the EU. Indeed, its economy is already about 3 percent smaller than it would have been had it voted to stay.

Brexit itself was a radical democratic act, but its effects are likely to be felt in a gradual and painful process of relative economic decline for a decade at least. As Britain’s economy adjusts, the erosion of manufacturing in particular threat-ens to harm many of those who put their faith in Johnson’s promises. At its worst, Britain could face a Mediterranean future similar to countries like Italy, which have long strug-gled economically and whose politics have grown more unstable as a result. Rather than an act of national libera-tion and transformation, Brexit risks leaving Britain alone to navigate a more complex and uncertain global era, feeling more out of control than ever.

JAMES CRABTREE (@jamescrabtree) is an associate profes-sor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and the author of The Billionaire Raj.

CUMMINGS’S PLANS ARE EYE�CATCHING, BUT THEY REQUIRE DEFT STATE

DIRECTION THAT WOULD BE HIGHLY UNUSUAL IN RECENT

BRITISH HISTORY.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 43

IN SEPTEMBER 2019, two months before officially taking office, the new European Commission president was already insist-ing that the European Union needed to change. On the one hand, Ursula von der Leyen promised a new “geopolitical Commission,” but on the other, she wanted the EU “to be the guardian of multilateralism.” The difficult question was left unstated: How exactly is the EU supposed to reconcile the great-power maneuvering of geopolitics with the more level playing field of multilateralism?

Geopolitics is the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by pow-erful states, no matter the cost to others. Multilateralism involves mutual agreements among states pursuing their collective welfare. At a minimum, the two sit awkwardly with each other; at the worst, they are radically incompati-ble. The latter is true of the current system of globalization, which has been supported by a complex system of multilat-eral rules and agreements among states.

Von der Leyen—and the EU—faces a fundamental strate-gic dilemma. More than any ordinary nation-state, the EU is as pure a creature of multilateral globalization as exists in the world. It is most comfortable when the outside world mirrors its traditional internal principles of organization: free economic exchange and mutually beneficial cooperation.

Deglobalization has cut the EU adrift. In the new world order, geopolitics—in the form of newly assertive great powers like the United States and China—is coming to trump old trade commitments and international cooperation. Europe, for its part, has been vacillating between defending the remnants of multilateralism and building up geopolitical muscle so it

A MOST LONELY UNIONThe EU is a creature of multilateralism. Can it survive in a deglobalized world?

b y H E N R YF A R R E L L

Illustration by BRIAN STAUFFER

can pursue its own strategic self-interest. The coronavirus crisis—in which other member

states have been willing to leave Italy high and dry—shows how the EU may suffer if it does not figure out how to reconcile these clashing imperatives. Geo-politics abroad may come to roost at home, under-mining the solidarity that the EU needs to exist.

GLOBALIZATION REMADE EUROPE before it remade the world. The historian Quinn Slobodian has shown how the driving ideas of globalization—strength-ening cross-border exchange and restraining the nation-state—were the motivating force behind European integration.

The EU (then called the European Economic Community) was founded in a 1957 treaty that set out the new group’s aims: eliminating restrictions on the import and export of goods between its mem-ber states and abolishing “obstacles to freedom of movement for persons, services and capital.” These “four freedoms”—for things, people, services, and money—are still the cornerstone of the EU.

The four freedoms were supposed to not only power an economic dynamo but also build the foun-dations of a lasting peace. For most of modern his-tory, Europe had been torn apart by wars between great powers such as Germany and France. The founders of the EU wanted to transform the poli-tics of Europe, replacing geopolitical conflict with shared institutions and cooperation. Power had to be recognized: The size of the bigger member states meant that they got more votes on crucial EU decisions. However, their clout was balanced by institutions such as the European Commission and European Court of Justice (ECJ), which were supposed to deal evenhandedly with all members and protect the interests of the smaller states.

The result was a unique set of political arrange-ments. The EU has never looked much like a national state. It employs fewer people than a regional government, has no army, and has very limited spending power. Even today, its national security powers are negligible: The key decisions are taken by its member states.

What it has is the power of rules. The commission proposes laws, drafts regulations, and makes anti-trust decisions. The ECJ interprets EU law, as well

44 SPRING 2020

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 45

as the basic treaty texts that the EU is founded on, when national courts ask it to.

Together, the court and commission drew on the four free-doms to build a European free market, enhancing their own authority in the process. ECJ decisions struck down national standards and rules that restricted imports from other mem-ber states. The commission issued common regulations to support a truly European marketplace. Its Directorate- General for Competition acted as an antitrust enforcer against potential monopolists. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the commission implemented a highly ambitious “single mar-ket” program aimed at eliminating existing barriers to trade and exchange. Even before the current wave of globalization began, the EU was building a globalization in miniature. Within EU borders, markets and free movement dominated while free trade rules constrained national governments from building favored firms into national champions.

When globalization really began to take off in the 1990s, the EU was thus ready to help shape it. It understood how to knock down barriers to market competition. The founding director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Peter Sutherland, had been Europe’s competition commis-sioner at the height of the single market program. In some ways, the EU was more comfortable with globalization than the United States was. After all, it had been founded on the belief that open commerce and shared institutions were a better guarantee of peace than great-power maneuverings.

Like the United States, the EU resisted multilateralism in areas of trade that might undermine internal political bargains or sensitive external relationships. Europe was slow to abandon restrictions on textile imports. It was notoriously opposed to free trade in bananas, which might damage its ties to former European colonies. Nonetheless, it grudgingly opened up.

The EU gradually discovered that it could turn its embrace of globalization into a strategy of influence. It could use the internal market’s rules and standards to shape the rules and standards of a globalized world. The EU’s combination of a large market and a common standard setting system gave it unique leverage in many sectors. While the United States had a big market too, its internal regulations and standards were often weak or created by squabbling private organiza-tions. The commission was a sophisticated and internation-ally oriented regulator, with decades of experience in making

its regulations work across different countries. Often, it was able not only to impose its rules and standards on multinational firms that wanted to sell to Europe but to get them to apply these rules and standards outside Europe too. This subtle form of influence, which Columbia University’s Anu Bradford has dubbed the “Brussels effect,” reshaped global markets.

In short, the EU seemed well adapted to a glo-balized world. The stronger the EU became, the easier it was to influence world markets in Europe’s direction. The relationship worked the other way too: The ideas of globalization helped EU officials push for further internal reforms. It was easier to push member states to accept more European integration in a world where everyone believed in open trade and free movement. Together, these created a feedback loop between European inte-gration and global markets.

NOW THAT FEEDBACK LOOP IS BREAKING DOWN. Just as the EU began to globalize before most other coun-tries, it started encountering problems earlier too. International market integration necessarily limited national democracy—and voters didn’t always like it. When EU leaders tried to introduce a new consti-tution in 2005, French and Dutch voters rejected it. A somewhat less ambitious follow-up document, the Treaty of Lisbon, was rejected by Irish voters in 2008 (though it passed when they were asked to vote again in 2009). The 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated the problems of easy financial flows across borders. The EU was especially weak in financial regulation, meaning banks could relo-cate their most risky and speculative lending to lax jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom and Ire-land without difficulty. And as the Greek debt cri-sis mounted, power politics—and the self-interest of Germany—reemerged within Europe. German taxpayers were unwilling to support further inte-gration if it meant they had to pay the bill.

The Brussels effect turned out to have limita-tions as well. The EU was able to spread its pri-vacy rules worldwide, but it was too late to help European firms. Europe’s information economy had already been eaten up by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other big technology firms. These are not just companies that can be tamed through ordinary antitrust regulation: They aspire to become economies in their own right. Amazon, for example, is already both a marketplace and

EVEN BEFORE THE CURRENT WAVE OF GLOBALIZATION BEGAN, THE EU WAS BUILDING A GLOBALIZATION IN MINIATURE.46 SPRING 2020

a formidable market regulator, setting rules for the businesses that use its many different back-end services. Even before 2016, it was clear that the EU’s approach to globalization needed to be updated to deal with market actors that were themselves effectively evolving into markets.

Now Europe is facing the new challenges of a deglobalizing world. The Trump administration wants to tear apart the existing globalized economy and replace it with an “America First” approach to trade. It scorns multilateralism in favor of threats and one-sided bargains. It fears China as an adver-sary and is trying to cut it out of global technology supply chains. When the Trump administration decided to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, it threatened to punish allies that were imperti-nent enough to uphold a treaty that the United States itself negotiated. As the political scientist Abraham Newman and I have argued, the United States is weaponizing the trade and financial net-works that wove globalization together and turn-ing them into tools of coercion.

Unfortunately for Europe, the United States isn’t the only problem. China is not as powerful as the United States but is just as ruthless in exploiting what economic leverage it has. For example, it has threatened to retaliate against German car man-ufacturers if Germany gives in to U.S. pressure to block the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei. When a Swedish writers’ organization gave a prize to a dissident Chinese publisher late last year, China’s ambassador to Sweden said on Swedish public radio: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we got shotguns,” warning of trade restrictions.

Globalization is unraveling as the United States and China face off against each other. It will not unravel completely: The world’s economies are too entangled to be easily separated from each other. But the way that the global economy works is now at odds with the way that Europe itself does business. Deglobalization has especially imper-iled the multilateral institutions governing trade. The WTO Appellate Body, which serves as a final court of appeal for trade decisions, cannot do its work because the United States is vetoing new appointments to it. The EU is trying to keep the appellate system on life support through inde-pendent arbitration.

The Trump administration’s invocation of a national security exception to justify its tariffs on steel and aluminum may be an even greater threat

to the multilateral trade regime that Europe favors. Global free trade will not survive if states can invoke national security more or less on a whim, but the current U.S. administration may provoke an even bigger crisis if the WTO rules against it.

Europe now finds itself caught between two unattractive alternatives. It can accept deglobalization and embrace geo-politics, pushing to protect its own businesses as the United States and China protects theirs. Already, there are moves within Europe in this direction: Politicians are talking about watering down antitrust regulations and building and pro-moting European businesses. However, this would mean giving up on the multilateral institutions that Europe has relied on and hoping that soft power can be transformed into hard bargaining strength. That may be possible, but it will require luck, time, and profound internal transformation.

For example, the EU is unhappy with how the United States has used the dominance of the dollar to bully European offi-cials and firms. If it wants to build the euro as a credible alter-native, it will have to create a real system of common banking regulation and shared fiscal capacities, as well as offer stabil-ity to non-European currencies in times of economic crisis, just as the United States has. Even this might be insufficient. Europe has just lost its greatest geopolitical asset: the city of London, which is one of the core nodes in the global financial network. Building up clout would require the EU to figure out practical ways to bring London back into its orbit.

Alternatively, Europe can double down on protecting the existing multilateral system, working with other states such as Japan and Canada to build an “alliance for multilateralism.” The problem is that the two other great economic powers are taking just the opposite course. Even if the Trump adminis-tration is replaced by a Democratic leadership, the days of easy multilateralism will never return. Democrats, too, are hawkish about China, and presidential candidates like Ber-nie Sanders are skeptical about the old free trade nostrums.

EUROPE NEEDS MORE THAN knee-jerk multilateralism or geopo-litical cunning if it is to prosper. Naive multilateralism would lead to the EU getting squashed. Geopolitical cunning on its own would suggest that the EU should adopt Trumpism (or

THE EU GRADUALLY DISCOVERED THAT IT COULD TURN ITS EMBRACE OF

GLOBALIZATION INTO A STRATEGY OF INFLUENCE.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 47

Xi Jinping-ism) with European characteristics, championing national firms at home while aggressively pressing its interests abroad. This is a recipe for failure. Europe’s external influence is based on patience and persuasion rather than brute force; it would wither if it became a crude proxy for self-interest. With-out a shared commitment to problem-solving, Europe’s inter-nal market would degenerate into a sordid squabble among member states, each favoring its own politically connected firms. Even worse, the political union might disintegrate, as member states absorbed the lesson that national interest trumps all. The EU can manage some temporary national ruth-lessness, of the kind exhibited in the Greek debt crisis, or the decision of some member states to close their borders to pre-vent the spread of the coronavirus. But even this is damaging, and it would undermine the EU if it continued indefinitely.

What Europe needs is a new understanding of its place in the world to connect its internal and external environments. EU experts used to describe the “bicycle theory” of European integration, claiming that, like a bicycle, European integra-tion must keep on moving or it will fall over. In its golden age, globalization acted as Europe’s bicycle chain connecting the gear of its inner order and the gear of its outside environ-ment, propelling the whole system forward. Now it needs a new strategy and a new bike chain.

It is a mistake to think of deglobalization as a universal withdrawal of nation-states from the world economy. It is altogether more complex. The push toward economic decou-pling goes together with new needs for global engagement. The challenge of climate change will require extensive global cooperation. Under the digital platform economy, algorithms designed by market actors inevitably allow global information flows to impinge on national-level democracy. (New forms of machine learning, for example, can lump users of digital services into self-perpetuating disadvantaged categories such that a person’s online habits might make it nearly impossible for them to find a job or to get a loan on reasonable terms.)

Both of these challenges provide new ways to connect Europe’s inside and outside. If Europe is to tackle them, it will need to move to an unparalleled level of internal inte-gration, where it thinks about internal market rules—right from the beginning—as external means of projecting Euro-pean interests and values. Responding to climate change will require large-scale regulation and coordinated investment. Properly regulating information platforms will mean a fun-damental shift in how the EU thinks about market power so that it incorporates an understanding of how the accumula-tion of data creates its own forms of influence.

Yet integration on its own will be insufficient: Both are global problems. Europe’s challenge, then, is to figure out how climate globalization and information globalization can become a new bicycle chain, using the smaller gear of European integration to propel change in the global

economy and the larger gear of the global econ-omy to power change within Europe.

Europe is taking initial steps in this direction. The new proposals to price carbon emissions into border taxes provide one example of how this can be done, creating a virtuous cycle between Europe’s own efforts to reduce carbon emissions and those of other world producers, which will either have to match these efforts or pay a sur-tax when selling to the European market. In con-trast to traditional tariffs, the ideal outcome of this border tax is that no one will have to pay it because the hope is that everyone will move to more carbon-efficient forms of production. Even better would be if Europe’s competitors introduced carbon taxes and carbon regulation too, making it easier to eventually build a global institutional infrastructure.

Antitrust regulation, too, is changing. Suther-land’s distant successor as EU competition com-missioner, Margrethe Vestager, is pioneering a new approach to global enforcement. Privacy regula-tion, citizen protection, and traditional antitrust regulation are no longer seen as separate priori-ties but as different aspects of a single problem: reducing inequities of power within the market to prevent abuses. Again, this promises to help cre-ate a mutually reinforcing relationship between European and global rules—although here the challenge is far greater, since what European and other democracies value may be seen by countries such as China as undermining their domestic sys-tem of rule. The EU will have a hard time figuring out creative rules to tame big tech companies, but if it succeeds, it can use the Brussels effect to spread these values to other jurisdictions.

None of this will be easy in a world where the United States and China weaponize their eco-nomic clout. Yet it is necessary. Europe’s apparent dilemma between geopolitics and multilateralism reflects a much deeper problem. Deglobalization has broken the relationship between Europe’s way of organizing itself and Europe’s way of acting in the world. Rebuilding that relationship will require Europe to discover new ways to couple the engine of integration to the engine of globalization so that strategy and multilateralism point again in the same direction.

HENRY FARRELL (@henryfarrell) is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University.

48 SPRING 2020

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BY MOST MEASURES JIMMY CARTER’S PRESIDENCY was a lackluster one. Ameri-cans were experiencing malaise at home and a string of apparent defeats abroad, highlighted by the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. Yet these twin crises produced the Carter Doc-trine, which has served the United States and its allies well ever since.

The Carter Doctrine explicitly committed the United States to defend the oil fields of the Persian Gulf against external threats. Carter’s succes-sor, President Ronald Reagan, built on this strategy with what should be seen as a “Reagan Corollary,” which committed Washington to defend-ing the free export of Gulf oil against threats from within the Middle East as well. Since then, both Republican and Democratic administra-tions have recognized that the U.S. role in protecting Gulf oil exports constitutes a critical component of the international order the United States built after 1945—an order that has made the country stronger, more secure, and more prosperous than it otherwise would have been.

Until now. In the summer of 2019, President Donald Trump tossed the United States’ alliances with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states into the flames of his own

B Y H A L B R A N D S , S T E V E N A . C O O K , A N D K E N N E T H M . P O L L A C K

W H Y A M E R I C A

S H O U L D N ’ T A B A N D O N T H E M I D D L E E A S T

Trump has wrecked a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, causing irreparable damage

to the Middle East—and the world order.

Illustration by MIKE MCQUADE50 SPRING 2020

inadvertent bonfire. By withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and imposing “maximum pres-sure” on Tehran economically, Trump provoked the Iranians to begin attacking the Gulf states and their oil exports. May, June, and July 2019 saw attacks on six oil tank-ers, the seizure of two more, rocket and missile attacks from Iraq and Yemen, and drone attacks on Saudi airports. Through it all, the United States did next to nothing in terms of a mil-itary response. Worse, Trump and his senior subordinates publicly insisted that they did not consider Iranian attacks on America’s Gulf allies to be threats to its vital interests.

In September, Iran upped the ante by conducting a mass drone and cruise missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s irreplace-able Abqaiq and Khurais petroleum processing plants. Again, Trump did nothing. And by doing so, he undercut the central premise of U.S. strategy in the Gulf. By calling into question the United States’ long-standing commitment to the security and stability of the region, Trump’s approach to Iran and the Gulf will have grave consequences. It threatens to destabilize an already volatile region and undermine the U.S. strategic position vis-à-vis Tehran. Indeed, the U.S. strike in January that killed Qassem Suleimani, the leader of Iran’s paramili-tary Quds Force, threatens simply to distract us from a larger geopolitical reality: Trump’s desertion of the Carter Doctrine is making it more likely that Tehran will achieve its great-est strategic victory since the Islamic Revolution—a victory that is still very much in the United States’ interest to deny.

1 1979 WAS A TUMULTUOUS YEAR even by the standards of the Middle East. The Islamic Revolution, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Arab fury at the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Saddam Hus-sein’s accession to the presidency of Iraq, and the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca threw the region into chaos and spawned radical new threats. Moreover, between the civil strife that followed the shah’s fall and Ayatollah Ruhol-lah Khomeini’s disdain for the corruption bred by Iran’s oil wealth, Iranian oil production collapsed to one-fifth of its prerevolutionary level. The resulting oil shock caused dra-matic increases in inflation and unemployment throughout the Western world. Fuel shortages forced Americans to line up for hours to buy gasoline. Things were so bad that even Carter, whose inclination was to resist rather than embrace new military commitments, was forced to act.

In his State of the Union address in January 1980, Carter proclaimed that the United States would use force to safe-guard the Gulf’s oil fields against outside invasion. At the

time, what became known as the Carter Doctrine was chiefly aimed at the Soviet Union, which bordered Iran and then had tens of thousands of troops in neighboring Afghanistan. The Iranian oil crisis had driven home the importance of Gulf oil to Western prosperity, and Washington feared that the Soviets would seize on the chaos of the Iranian revolution to overrun the region’s oil fields. To put teeth into the new commitment, Carter created a new military force that even-tually grew into U.S. Central Command, which was given the primary responsibility of defending the region’s oil exports.

Yet it soon became clear that threats to those exports could come from within the region as well. In September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. From the start of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, both sides attacked each other’s oil production and export facilities. In 1987, Iran expanded the conflict, targeting the oil exports of the GCC states for supporting Iraq. After much debate, the United States launched Opera-tion Earnest Will in response, escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers transiting the Gulf. Iran would not back down and attacked both the tankers and their U.S. Navy escorts, triggering an air-naval war across the Gulf in which American forces destroyed much of the Iranian navy. Thus, a Reagan Corol-lary was appended to the Carter Doctrine: The United States would defend Gulf oil exports against all military threats, whether from within the region or without.

Two years after the conflict between Iran and Iraq ended, Saddam mounted a challenge to the Reagan Corollary, invading and attempting to annex Kuwait. The United States responded with Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, deploying more than 600,000 troops and roughly half of its worldwide combat forces to defend Saudi Arabia and liberate Kuwait. What’s more, President George H.W. Bush’s administration purposely destroyed much of Iraq’s military power to dimin-ish or eliminate Saddam’s ability to threaten the Gulf states.

2 OPERATION DESERT STORM DID NOT, however, relieve the United States of the burden of defending the Gulf. Any Iraq strong enough to balance Iran was more than strong enough to over-run the GCC, and any Iran strong enough to balance Iraq was equally a threat to the region. Thus, officials in both the Bush and Bill Clinton administrations concluded that only a signifi-cant U.S. presence could contain Iraq and Iran and deter them from renewed aggression. Throughout the 1990s, the United States also periodically undertook limited interventions to force Saddam to comply with U.N. sanctions and prevent him from coercing the Gulf states or threatening their oil exports.

Over time, the frustrations of containing Saddam’s regime

mounted. The U.S. objective vis-à-vis Iraq gradually shifted to regime change, with the decisive break coming after 9/11. President George W. Bush’s administration had multiple rationales for invading Iraq in 2003, some of which were strategically sensible while others were not. Ensuring that the GCC states were never again threatened by Saddam was on that list but seems to have been near the bottom—cer-tainly well below the administration’s paramount fear that Saddam would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

Yet having invaded and then botched the reconstruction of Iraq so badly that it pushed the country into all-out civil war, Bush opted not to walk away from the mess but instead to sta-bilize the country with the so-called surge that sent more U.S. forces to Iraq to implement a new strategy. Bush’s recognition that allowing Iraq to spiral out of control would threaten the wider region and its oil production partially motivated his deci-sion to double down rather than accept defeat and withdraw. “The consequences of failure,” Bush explained in announc-ing the surge, would be “chaos in the region,” which would jeopardize the region’s vital energy supplies and perhaps even allow terrorists to “use oil revenues to fund their ambitions.”

In contrast, President Barack Obama rose to prominence largely on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War. He believed that the United States’ presence in the Middle East undermined its power and withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Yet Obama was forced to reverse these cherished poli-cies in 2014 to protect the region’s oil exports. He committed U.S. forces and built an international coalition to fight the Islamic State in part because it threatened to spread beyond its Syrian and Iraqi origins and destabilize the oil-rich region. Moreover, Obama’s signature regional policy—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal—was meant to ensure that the United States could pivot from the Middle East to Asia without leaving in its wake a nuclearizing Iran that would overawe the Gulf.

For decades, then, defending the oil exports of the United States’ Gulf allies has been a cornerstone of U.S. global strat-egy. Throughout, the United States established and upheld the basic rules of conduct in the region: It would meet efforts to interfere with the free flow of oil by force; uphold free-dom of navigation; demand that regional powers give up their irredentist claims on other states or face grave conse-quences; and prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Even presidents who were initially reluctant to get involved in the region ended up affirming this basic approach. Until Trump, apparently.

3 TRUMP’S BREAK WITH DECADES OF U.S. STRATEGY in the Gulf has been conducted in his typically cavalier manner. But it did not come out of nowhere. Americans have been debating their long-standing strategic commitment to the Gulf for several years now. Critics of that commitment have offered multiple arguments for why Washington ought to pull back from the region. Each stems from realities that should refine U.S. strategy toward the Gulf but not abandon it, as Trump appears to be doing.

The most pervasive argument in favor of ditching the Gulf is that the United States’ commitment is simply unneces-sary because of the shale revolution. In the decade after 2008, U.S. crude oil production increased 140 percent. In November 2018, the United States exported more oil than it imported for the first time since the Energy Department started keeping record in 1973. This surge has caused U.S. oil imports from OPEC members to drop to nearly one-quarter their level in 2008. In short, the United States imports less from the Gulf than ever, and the expansion of North Ameri-can shale production (along with the growth in strategic oil stockpiles) has made the global market better able to with-stand small and medium disruptions. The relatively mod-est economic damage wrought by Iran’s attack on Abqaiq and Khurais illustrated this new reality. All of this should breed confidence that the United States does not have to react every time an Iranian speedboat leaves harbor, but it should not lead to the mistaken belief that Gulf oil is no longer important to U.S. security and prosperity.

To begin with, the U.S. role in the Gulf has never been about protecting America’s own oil imports, only a mod-est proportion of which ever came from the region. Rather, U.S. forces have patrolled the Gulf because the health of the global economy and therefore global security are inextricably connected to the region’s energy resources. This is why the United States cared about Gulf stability even when it was a net oil exporter in the early 20th century. “The Marshall Plan for Europe,” U.S. Defense Secretary James Forrestal noted in the late 1940s, “could not succeed without access to the Middle East oil.” So long as U.S. allies and trading partners remain dependent on Gulf oil, so long as preserving a sta-ble global economy is a primary national interest, and so long as supply or price shocks in one region can resonate

F O R D E C A D E S , D E F E N D I N G T H E O I L E X P O R T S O F T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S ’ G U L F A L L I E S H A S B E E N

A C O R N E R S T O N E O F U . S . G L O B A L S T R A T E G Y .

worldwide, the United States will have an interest in defend-ing Gulf oil flows. And so long as U.S. allies lack the capability to project power and U.S. regional partners lack the military competence (despite decades of U.S. arms sales and training) needed to protect Gulf oil flows themselves, the United States will have to take primary responsibility for that mission.

It is also important to understand the limits of today’s rel-ative hydrocarbon stability. Although the global oil market is more resilient than in the past, it still cannot withstand a major oil shock, such as the loss of most or all Saudi produc-tion for an extended period. In 2018, Middle Eastern OPEC members were still responsible for about 25 percent of global oil production. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that by 2050, Middle Eastern oil production will grow to 31 percent of the global supply, while U.S. production is expected to peak in the next decade and decline thereafter. It’s worth noting that the 1979 oil crisis caused by the Ira-nian revolution removed 4 to 7 percent of oil from the mar-ket. Today, Saudi production accounts for 10 to 12 percent.

Thus, the fact that the oil market has not responded more adversely to small-scale attacks may provide a false sense of security that instability in the Gulf can no longer harm the United States or the global economy—or that someone else can protect U.S. interests there. The United States is better insulated from disruptions to Gulf oil supplies than it once was but not nearly enough to turn its back on the region.

4

A SECOND CRITIQUE OF THE U.S. COMMITMENT to the Gulf is that the renewal of great-power competition requires the United States to pull back from secondary theaters. It is true that competition with China and Russia should be the United States’ highest strategic priority and that Washington will struggle to compete effectively if it is engaged in large-scale military operations in the Middle East.

The force structure required to prevent Iran or others from disrupting the world’s oil supply is quite modest, how-ever, and that mission should not require costly, multiyear nation-building missions. Deterring Iran has never required more than a small U.S. military presence in the Gulf, typi-cally no more than a handful of surface naval combatants, a squadron of air force fighters or an aircraft carrier, and

prepositioned equipment for several Army and Marine bri-gades, themselves based in the United States. At this point, even doing more to help stabilize Iraq would require only a small U.S. military footprint, combined with greater eco-nomic and political aid. None of this should detract mean-ingfully from U.S. security commitments in Europe or Asia, let alone bankrupt America’s global military posture.

Moreover, the collapse of the U.S. position in the Gulf would have global ramifications. Most U.S. allies and key security partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific still depend on Gulf oil. They have a tangible stake in the Gulf, which they look to Washington to defend because they cannot do it themselves. In an age of intensifying challenges to U.S. power, allies—and adversaries—are paying close attention to which commit-ments the United States is or is not willing to maintain. Given the importance of the U.S. commitment to the Gulf over the decades, precipitately abandoning that commitment is likely to unnerve those allies, making them doubt the reliability of U.S. power and thereby undermining alliances well beyond the Gulf region. The United States can’t abandon the region without weakening the global network of alliances and part-nerships it will need to compete with its geopolitical rivals.

A related critique holds that the U.S. commitment to the Gulf leads inevitably to long, draining conflicts such as the Iraq War. Yet this conflates two very different things. One can support what is essentially a denial (or, if deterrence fails, a punishment) mission overwhelmingly reliant on modest air and sea power to prevent Iran from disrupting Gulf oil supplies without supporting manpower-intensive counter-insurgency, regime change, or nation-building missions. Put differently, one can believe that the Iraq War was a mistake and also believe it would be a mistake to walk away from the United States’ larger position in the Gulf.

Finally, some contend that the United States should dis-tance itself from the Gulf as a way of distancing itself from the Saudi regime. Yet the Saudi-American security relation-ship was not built on U.S. sympathy for Saudi values but for the vast reserves of oil beneath Saudi sands. Riyadh has never been a perfect ally, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is a particularly problematic partner. But the United States’ long-standing relationship with Saudi Ara-bia is based on the U.S. national interest in ensuring that Saudi Arabia can and will export oil to the global market-place. Dropping the Gulf security mission to punish Saudi Arabia for its misdeeds would be the geopolitical equiva-lent of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

T H E F O R C E S T R U C T U R E R E Q U I R E D T O P R E V E N T I R A N O R O T H E R S F R O M D I S R U P T I N G T H E

W O R L D ’ S O I L S U P P L Y I S Q U I T E M O D E S T .

54 SPRING 2020

5

IN HIS OWN IGNORANT AND IDIOSYNCRATIC WAY, Trump mani-fests many of the issues that have been causing Americans to rethink the U.S. role in that region. He has promised to achieve an ill-defined “energy dominance” that will insulate the United States from a volatile world. He has repeatedly argued that nothing good can come of U.S. military involve-ment in the Middle East. His administration has publicly touted a shift toward great-power rivalry and the need for retrenchment in the Gulf—even while insisting, at least in Syria, that a U.S. military presence is needed “only for the oil.” And while Trump has defended the Saudi regime against its growing chorus of critics, he has long said the wealthy Gulf states should take up the burden of their own defense.

All of these conflicting tendencies leave Trump incapable of understanding the logic behind the U.S. commitments he inher-ited in the Gulf. Moreover, he has exacerbated the long-build-ing tensions in U.S. policy by pursuing an Iran policy that is destabilizing, self-defeating, and riddled with contradictions.

Since early 2018, the president’s policy toward Iran has been a bewildering combination of belligerence and weak-ness. Determined to undo a key aspect of Obama’s diplo-matic legacy, Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal over the objections of advisors who noted that the accord was successfully forestalling the prospect of a nuclear Iran. The administration then pursued a maximum pressure campaign that inflicted significant pain on the Iranian economy by driving down Tehran’s oil exports. U.S. officials insisted that this campaign was meant to produce a better nuclear deal, but the administration never articulated any clear sense of what such a deal would entail or how it might be obtained.

Yet U.S. coercion did have a major strategic effect—one that Trump appears not to have expected, even though he should have. By withdrawing from the nuclear deal, Trump empow-ered Iranian hard-liners who had always opposed making a bargain with Washington and emasculated the pragmatists who favored accommodation with the United States. Thus, he weakened the only Iranian faction that might have been willing to negotiate a new nuclear deal. Moreover, by stran-gling the Iranian economy, Trump encouraged Tehran to respond with one of the few forms of counterpressure avail-able to it: military operations against the Gulf states and their oil exports. In so doing, the administration provoked pre-cisely the sorts of actions that U.S. officials have long averred the United States could not abide. Trump’s response then exposed the glaring contradiction at the heart of his policy: A president who talked tough and used sanctions aggressively gave the unmistakable impression that he lacked any appe-tite for the dangerous confrontation that was sure to follow.

Contrary to 40 years of U.S. policy, Trump declined to punish Iran militarily for any of its provocations in the Gulf. Senior U.S. officials, starting with the president, instead insisted that Washington would not employ force unless Iran attacked U.S. citizens or property directly. The admin-istration then made good on this particular red line. The Suleimani hit came after an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia killed a U.S. contractor in a rocket attack, which prompted U.S. airstrikes on that militia, which, in turn, led to staged demonstrations that damaged the outer perimeter of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Killing Suleimani was a dramatic statement of U.S. military prowess and was accompanied by an expansion of the U.S. military footprint in the region to deter further Iranian retaliation. Yet the Suleimani strike and its aftermath simply underscored, albeit unintention-ally, the ambivalence of Trump’s policy in the Gulf.

The strike intensified the pressure on America’s posi-tion in the region by pushing many Iraqi political leaders to call for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from that country. The strike also highlighted the contrast between Trump’s willingness to employ disproportionate force in response to attacks on U.S. citizens and his unwillingness to use any force in response to far more brazen and dangerous Iranian attacks on America’s regional allies. In fact, the killing of Suleimani elicited concerns that an unpredictable Wash-ington was now ratcheting up its confrontation with Iran at the same time that it was abandoning its traditional com-mitment to the Gulf—that it was becoming more belliger-ent in the Gulf while also becoming less committed to the Gulf. The Suleimani strike surely put some fear into Ira-nian leaders in the short term, but it hasn’t done much to alter the growing perception that the United States is los-ing interest in protecting its longtime allies.

6

ONE OF THE MANY PROBLEMS WITH THE CONTRADICTIONS in Trump’s policy is how they have scrambled the concerns of other knowl-edgeable Americans. In the days following the various Iranian attacks last summer, many leaders and experts focused more on the dangers of responding militarily than on the dangers of not responding at all. Trump himself invoked the specter of the Iraq War to dismiss criticism that his administration was too passive in the face of Iranian provocations and aggression.

The killing of Suleimani also quickly became part of Wash-ington’s high-stakes political struggle. Yet lost amid the parti-san fireworks—and Iran’s fairly restrained initial response—is the fact that the U.S.-Iran confrontation will surely continue as Iran throws off the remaining restrictions of the nuclear

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 55

deal, as the struggle for regional influence intensifies, and as the Trump administration continues to strangle the Iranian economy and demand concessions that Tehran is unlikely to make. Indeed, even if Trump deterred Tehran from seek-ing to kill more Americans in the short term, over the longer term he may have given Iran and its proxies another reason to strike U.S. forces, facilities, and other targets: revenge.

Moreover, the Suleimani killing appears to have caused Iran to reassess its own strategic approach to the Gulf and to the U.S. presence there. Iran has always wanted the United States out of the region, but for most of the last 40 years, this was little more than a distant aspiration. The Suleimani killing appears to have convinced Iran’s hard-line leadership that the United States is simply too dangerous and unpredictable an actor to have as a neighbor in a country as important to Iran as Iraq. Likewise, Trump’s flouting of Iraqi sovereignty and unwillingness to respond to Iranian attacks on GCC oil exports have created the very tangible prospect that Iran could greatly diminish or even eliminate the U.S. military presence in the region in the foreseeable future—years, not decades. And because Iranian attacks on the Gulf states suc-cessfully began to drive a wedge between Washington and its traditional allies in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere, part of Iran’s response to the Suleimani killing may come in the Gulf. No revenge would be sweeter for Suleimani than finally evicting the United States from the region.

No one should dismiss or exaggerate Iran’s ability in this continuing struggle. The danger it can pose is considerable, given its capacity to foment violence throughout the region—in the Gulf and the Bab el-Mandeb, in Iraq and along Israel’s southern and northern borders—as well as its propensity to conduct or sponsor terrorist attacks. Yet if Iran is danger-ous, it is hardly omnipotent. Tehran’s conventional mili-tary and cybercapabilities pale beside those of the United States. Meanwhile, the specter of an Iraq-style quagmire is overblown, if only because no serious analyst or policymaker advocates a march on Tehran. The question is thus whether the United States is willing to use its power and influence to defend a broader concept of regional order—not simply to avenge attacks on its own civilians. Here Trump’s policies have had mostly negative effects.

Even with the Suleimani hit, the Gulf states are more con-vinced than ever that the United States is no longer willing to defend them. Through the GCC’s prism, the reluctance to take on Iran is the most recent (and most significant) sign of U.S. incompetence and unreliability—a parade of errors that includes the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the failure to support Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and the unwill-ingness to intervene in Syria from 2011 to 2015, all of which accrued to Iran’s benefit. For the Gulf countries, these fail-ings were capped off with the Iranian nuclear deal, which terrified many of the Gulf states that Washington wanted to

trade its Arab alliance for an Iranian one. Trump’s hostility to Iran was initially welcomed by many U.S. partners in the region—until they realized that it came with an alarming degree of detachment from the consequences it elicited. Washington is moving into a period of simmering tension with Iran at a time when it has convinced many U.S. part-ners of its indifference to their security.

For the GCC, this is a nightmare. For the hard-liners who now dominate in Tehran, it is a dream come true. Since the revolution, Iranian leaders have sought to break the U.S.-Gulf alliance. They have always believed that Washington was determined to destroy the Iranian regime, and it was the United States’ alliance with the GCC states that brought U.S. military forces into the region to do so. Whether for reasons of ideology or Iranian nationalism, they have likewise sought hegemony across the Middle East, but U.S. guardianship of the region has been the greatest impediment to their designs. Of course, if the United States will not defend Gulf oil exports, there is no rationale for either side to keep U.S. military forces in the region. And without the U.S. security commitment, the Gulf states have little ability to resist Iran’s influence.

If the United States demonstrates that it will avoid a direct confrontation with Iran except when American blood is spilled, Tehran will be able to blackmail its Arab neighbors. The killing of Suleimani will not reverse the message that Iran’s attack on Abqaiq and Khurais and the lack of a U.S. response sent—that the United States is no longer interested in upholding the rules of conduct it once established and formerly enforced in the region. As a result, Iran is taking a giant step toward achieving what it has sought for so long: resetting the balance of power in its favor in the Gulf.

7

THIS SHIFT ALREADY HAS AND INCREASINGLY WILL ALTER the behav-ior of the GCC states. The Emiratis are withdrawing from the war in Yemen, which they joined to help prevent Iran’s Houthi allies from taking over. They have released $700 million in frozen Iranian assets. They have also begun talks with the Iranians about decreasing tensions in the region. The Sau-dis have so far not followed the Emirati lead in Yemen, but they are unhappily being pushed to consider doing so, and they have been forced to open regional security talks with Iran. By one light, these actions are often portrayed as con-structive steps that will diminish near-term tensions in the region. In the Gulf, however, they are understood as painful retreats and major concessions to Tehran.

In the wider scheme of things, Trump’s stance is forcing the

56 SPRING 2020

United States’ Arab allies to rethink their entire foreign-pol-icy and security strategies. Unfortunately, neither U.S. mili-tary equipment nor the deployment of additional U.S. forces seems particularly useful to the GCC states anymore, given pervasive doubts about U.S. intentions in the Gulf. It is still not clear what alternative approach the Arab states might embrace, but it seems unlikely to suit U.S. interests.

Since the Obama administration, many Arab states have explored creating stronger relationships with China and Rus-sia. Moscow and Beijing cannot replace the weaponry or the strategic peace of mind that the United States has tradition-ally provided. Still, in Syria, the Russians have shown them-selves to be competent, credible, and ready to lead. For its part, Beijing has capital to invest and will never demand lib-eralizing political reforms. It is striking that in an era in which there is broad agreement within the foreign-policy commu-nity that great-power competition is back, the United States has been so reticent about competing in the Middle East.

More ominously still, Saudi Arabia, which was formerly not a serious candidate to acquire nuclear weapons, is now the poster child for that problem. Over the years, Saudi officials hinted that they either already possessed or could quickly acquire a nuclear device, though there was no direct evidence of either. In truth, the Saudis never needed to proliferate because of their security relationship with the United States. Now, feeling abandoned by their longtime protectors, and still decades away from developing com-petent conventional forces, the Saudis have every reason to push for a nuclear device as the only way to avoid falling under Iran’s sway. There is an academic school of thought that argues that proliferation can be stabilizing. Given the uncertainties in the Gulf and the unpredictable changes underway in Saudi Arabia, that is not a social science exper-iment worth running.

Finally, Trump’s contradictory policy has put the United States on a path toward another Iran nuclear crisis. In response to Trump’s maximum pressure policy, Iran began to ignore some of its lesser obligations under the nuclear deal. In the aftermath of the Suleimani killing, Tehran announced that it would no longer be bound by those terms and would accelerate its departure from them. All of this raises the possibility that the United States will soon con-front the choice of how to respond to Tehran moving ever faster back toward a nuclear capability. Yet Trump has simultaneously weakened the anti-Iran coalition in the region and given Iranian hard-liners reason to think that they can sever the U.S.-GCC alliance. Moreover, as a result of the Suleimani killing—which shocked and appalled Iran’s leadership—Tehran’s hard-liners are both ever more firmly in charge and even less interested in negotiating with the man who just killed their idol and most effective military commander. In these circumstances, a so-called better

nuclear deal seems ever less likely, despite the economic pain Washington continues to inflict and the protests that continue to shake the political scene inside Iran.

If Trump were ever willing to reconsider his current course, all is probably not yet lost. The Suleimani strike shows that the United States has the ability to dominate the escalatory ladder vis-à-vis Iran. The Gulf states still hav-en’t found a better alternative to their traditional alliance with the United States; a determined U.S. about-face might convince them to stick with it. Yet U.S. strength only really matters if Washington is willing to assert it on behalf of the regional security order it has upheld for many decades. And because the United States has so depleted its credibility in the Gulf, doing so will now require more than a token mili-tary presence—and, most likely, more than would have been required to respond to Iran’s provocations in the spring and summer of 2019. The United States would need to respond to any further acts of Iranian aggression in the Gulf—not just against U.S. citizens or facilities—with direct action against Tehran’s interests: strikes against military facili-ties, warships, ballistic missile sites, command and con-trol nodes, or other valuable regime assets. Moreover, the United States would have to strike hard enough to demon-strate both to Iran and to the world that it will not back down from a fight and that if Iran chooses to escalate, so too will America. Ironically, this would probably be the best path to de-escalation—to convincing Iran to give up its military campaign against the GCC states.

Whether the president is willing to do this is anyone’s guess. Trump sees himself as a leader who shatters genera-tions of conventional wisdom in U.S. foreign policy, which is why he targeted Suleimani. Killing the leader of the Quds Force was a bold stroke, but it did not alter the reality that the United States’ Iran policy is a confusing combination of needless bellicosity, sanctions, and showmanship. Unless the president changes course, he will usher in a brave new era in U.S. relations with the Gulf—one that may well help Iran claim its long-sought ascendancy in that region and leave Americans longing, sooner or later, for the good old days of the Carter Doctrine.

HAL BRANDS (@HalBrands) is the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. STEVEN A. COOK (@stevenacook) is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Coun-cil on Foreign Relations. His latest book is False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East. KENNETH M. POLLACK is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, most recently, of the book Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 57

FP�QUINCY INSTITUTE FORUM:

A NEW VISION FOR AMERICA IN THE WORLD

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On Feb. 26, Foreign Policy and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft co-hosted A New Vision for America in the World, a leadership forum on the future of U.S. foreign policy and national security. The event brought together the foremost leaders and thinkers from across the U.S. foreign policy, defense, and security communities to explore rising calls for military restraint and a shift in the paradigm for U.S. global leadership and peace building.

TOPICS HIGHLIGHTED:

Ending endless wars in the Middle East

The impact of the Sino-American antagonism

Democratizing foreign policy

International cooperation in an era of American restraint

SPEAKERS INCLUDED:

Retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, Partner, KKR, and Chairman, KKR Global Institute

U.S. Reps. Ro Khanna (CA-17), Pramila Jayapal (WA-7) , and Andy Biggs (AZ-5)

Will Ruger, Vice President for Research and Policy, Charles Koch Institute

Rosa Brooks, Senior Fellow, New America

Retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, left, and Foreign Policy editor in chief Jonathan Tepperman

From left, Quincy Institute chairman Suzanne DiMaggio, U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-7), and U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs (AZ-5)

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reviews

TTHE POWER GOES OUT. AT FIRST, PEOPLE THINK it’s a momentary blip. They light candles and enjoy their suddenly more atmo-spheric dinners. But the power doesn’t return that evening or the next day. Or for weeks after that. A devastating Iranian cyberattack on the New York City power grid? No—a Swedish reality TV show called Nedslackt land (“Blackout Country”).

The first season, which concluded last year, begins with a group of 10 people arriving for a mystery experiment at two remote houses. Five of the participants are sent to a simple cottage, the other five to a state-of-the-art vacation home.

War Movies After WarTV shows like Occupied and Blackout Country give viewers a sense of life in a world of grayzone conflicts.By Elisabeth Braw

They expect a typical reality TV group exercise, something along the lines of a classy Big Brother. But the very first evening, the power goes out. They react as most of us would, their lives inter-rupted by the inconvenience but also made a little more exciting. But the cheer subsides as the Blackout Coun-try participants realize that the lights are off for good.A

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A scene from the Norwegian drama Occupied.

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM 75

reviews

The two houses’ occupants are of dif-ferent ages, have different educational and work backgrounds, belong to a range of ethnicities, and speak with varied regional accents. One of the men is out-doorsy, another has carpentry skills, but none has the foggiest idea of what to do during a sustained power cut. The next morning, with the water pipes no longer working, a small group decides to go and collect water from a nearby brook for the toilet, cooking, and cleaning dishes. For-get calling for help: The occupants soon learn that the power outage is not lim-ited to them. Sweden has been hit by a solar flare—although it could just as well have been a massive cyberattack on the country’s power grid for all they know—and the whole country is without power. They’re on their own.

The same feeling of isolation pervades another series, Occupied, a phenome-nally successful Norwegian television drama now in its third season. In it, Nor-way is taken over by a sinister alliance comprising Russia and the European Union. There’s no invasion, just a grad-ual encroachment of Norwegian sover-eignty by the country’s enemies, whose goals are unclear to the population: The aggression starts with a series of ener-gy-related demands on the Norwegian government (in the midst of a raging energy crisis, the visionary prime min-ister—Jesper Berg—had wanted to go green and end Norway’s oil production, thereby angering both Russia and the EU) but escalates quickly to maneuverers seemingly designed only to wear down the country’s will to stand up for itself.

When Berg is kidnapped by Russian special forces and taken to a hideout, for example, he receives a call from a senior EU official who demands that he reverse his decision. Viewers are left with the nagging fear that this could happen in real life. Henrik Mestad, who portrays the prime minister, is so convincing that you don’t just want to cast your vote for him but to free him from his captivity as well.

But how? Most Norwegians—in fact, most people around the world—would

be at a loss for how to respond to the kinds of grayzone attacks seen in Occu-pied. During World War II, brave Nor-wegian underground fighters bedeviled the country’s Nazi occupiers, slowing their progress. But how do you bedevil attackers below the threshold of war? In Occupied, some panic, some are para-lyzed, and virtually all are clueless—the same scenario as in Blackout Country. And as different as the shows are, that fact joins them as pioneers of a new kind of portrayal of war. This genre doesn’t relish in distant battles of the kinds that most people who are not in the armed forces will never see. Instead, it offers a civilian-centric view on conflict.

Not relegated to crowd scenes or brief moments of pathos before they perish, in both shows average citizens are at the center of the plot. In Occupied, soldiers make only occasional appearances. As the battle between the Russians and Free Norway, a guerrilla group determined to win back the country’s sovereignty, intensifies, journalists, bureaucrats, aca-demics, and even children are forced to discern what each side stands for—and which one is the lesser evil.

Likewise, in Blackout Country, it is up to the show’s participants to save them-selves. They aren’t caught up in any messy geopolitics. Rather, their daily lives are chronicled as hygiene deterio-rates, arguments break out, and survival of the fittest starts to prevail. In one epi-sode, the group tries to decide how to divide the last remaining food: Should everyone get equal amounts? Should it be distributed according to a person’s size? The women in the group argue that

such a system would be unfair to them. At another point, with the participants growing desperate, one group decides to forage for edible items. But where do you look? What’s edible? Which plants can be eaten raw?

In their focus on disrupted normal lives, both shows stand in sharp contrast to traditional movies about war like War Machine, American Sniper, Inglourious Basterds, and Zero Dark Thirty. Each year, moviegoers around the world can look forward to a menu of such enter-tainment covering every conceivable aspect of combat—real and imagined. At this year’s Oscars, another movie in that vein, 1917, received 10 nominations and three awards.

There’s a reason such films are increasingly set in the past, though. New forms of warfare are taking center stage in real life. One country can bring another to its knees without deploying a single soldier. It can, for example, target an electrical grid or the transportation network of a major city. Or a bank. Or an election. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York warned that a cyberattack against one of the United States’ largest banks could cripple the entire U.S. financial system.

China, Russia, and North Korea already hack Western companies on a daily basis. The U.S. electricity trans-mission company PJM Interconnection is subjected to 3,000-4,000 cyberattacks each month, its former CEO Terry Bos-ton revealed. Larger and more promi-nent companies are subjected to many millions of attacks every day. Not all originate with hostile states or their proxies, but many do. Last year, for example, Chinese government-linked hackers were found to have attacked at least 20 U.S. utilities. And Iranian hackers have further upped the game: A group known as Refined Kitten can now interfere with the control systems of power plants, factories, and refineries.

Increasingly, in other words, war may look like Blackout Country or Occupied—weeks without electricity or pressure on

In their focus on disrupted normal lives, both shows stand in sharp contrast to traditional movies about war.

76 SPRING 2020

your government so subtle that it isn’t clear whether a coup or a war is even taking place. And in these situations, the outcome of the battle comes down more and more to the public response. As Paul N. Stockton, a former U.S. assis-tant secretary of defense for homeland security affairs, noted in a 2018 report for Johns Hopkins University, adversar-ies may also “use social media and other means to spread further disinformation and incite public panic as part of their attacks.” And public panic is part of the point; sowing it leads to anarchy. And a weakened competitor is, of course, exactly what a grayzone attacker might want: victory without any of the expense or mess of conquering territory and then administering it.

Of course, the United States and other countries know all this and are improv-ing their defense against so-called gray-zone warfare: U.S. Cyber Command regularly responds to cyberattacks, even if only to, in a tactic reminiscent of the horse head scene in The Godfa-ther, indicate to potential attackers that they will be punished if they proceed. In 2018, Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency sent a brochure titled “If Crisis or War Comes” to all households in the country, instructing them what to do

in situations such as those portrayed in Blackout Country. Nevertheless, at some point an attack will succeed. All the better, then, that shows like Blackout Country and Occupied can give civilians a taste of what to expect. The shows are phenomenal entertainment, of course, but they also demonstrate what it means when a city goes dark and nobody knows what’s happening, how long it will last, or who is behind it while a mysterious adversary uploads disinformation to social media feeds on people’s quickly fading smartphones or when any given decision by a prime minister may be the result of coercion by another country.

That’s why, beyond entertaining, studios’ modern-warfare oeuvres can also inform the public about how war looks today. Most of us will never fly an attack helicopter or participate in infan-

try combat, but we are likely to encoun-ter nonmilitary aggression. Some of us already have, perhaps unknowingly. Russia is believed to have influenced the results of both the 2016 U.S. presiden-tial election and the Brexit referendum that year. And reports have indicated that Iranian government-linked hack-ers successfully attacked the U.S. gov-ernment contractor Westat in January. North Korean hackers have likewise targeted Western government officials, think tankers, and academics involved with nuclear nonproliferation.

There’s nothing positive about other countries threatening the public at large. But now that the aggression is here, it can be used for the benefit of the enter-tainment industry, national security, and the wider public all at once. And keeping your cool in a crisis is a useful skill even if the world’s nations suddenly agreed to universal peace: Like the par-ticipants in Blackout Country, we may find that Mother Nature can be the most fearsome grayzone adversary of all.

ELISABETH BRAW (@elisabethbraw) is the director of the Modern Deter-rence project at the Royal United Ser-vices Institute and a columnist for FOREIGN POLICY.

Beyond entertaining, studios’ modern-warfare oeuvres can also inform the public about how war looks today.S

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A press photo from the Swedish reality TV series Blackout Country.

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ON JAN. 26, A SUNDAY BUT ALSO A NATIONAL HOLIDAY, India cele-brated its 70th constitutional anniversary. The government hosted a grand military and cultural parade at Rajpath, a boulevard that links the stone arch of India Gate to the pres-idential palace in New Delhi. Looking on, in a saffron turban, was Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with his guest of honor, Jair Bol-sonaro. The president of Brazil had been snubbed by numer-ous democratic world leaders, but here he was, standing in the same place as earlier guests of honor such as Nelson Man-dela and Barack Obama.

In another part of the capital, the Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh was also celebrating Republic Day. The guests of honor there were two women wearing simple clothing and somber expressions. Radhika Vemula’s son Rohith Vemula was a Ph.D. scholar who had taken his own life in 2016 after a campaign of harassment led by authorities at the Univer-sity of Hyderabad. Saira Bano’s son Junaid Khan was killed in 2017, when he was stabbed in a train by some passengers. Both young men—one Dalit, the other Muslim—were victims of an ongoing, government-led agenda to establish Hindu supremacy in India. After the two mothers unfurled the national flag, a crowd of hundreds of thousands of onlookers burst into a spontaneous rendition of the national anthem.

The two celebrations were animated by entirely different ideas of what India is and to whom it belongs. They repre-sented a divide that has been simmering for decades but

which only manifested in nationwide protests since last December after a series of government actions proved beyond a doubt that Modi was not guided by the constitution.

Last August, his government revoked the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir. That same month, it also announced the results of a count of citizens in the eastern state of Assam, which could render nearly 2 million residents stateless. In November, the Supreme Court finally adjudicated on the matter of the disputed Mughal-era Babri Mosque, granting the land on which it was built to the Hindu petitioners even though it was Hindu extremists who had destroyed the mosque, many with their bare hands. The long-awaited decision was entirely expected; India’s once famously activ-ist judiciary, like its once fiercely inde-pendent mainstream media, now often bends to the will of the prime minister. Then, in December, the government passed a law that put persecuted for-eign minorities—excluding Muslims—on a fast track to citizenship.

All these actions are components of Modi’s overarching agenda, which is to turn India into a Hindu nation. This ulti-mate goal violates the very foundation of the country, which was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s belief that people of many faiths could and must coexist peacefully. Citizenship in India is based on birthright, not on blood or faith. But Modi is grinding fundamental rights, such as the right to equality and the right to freedom of religion, into the soil.

India has already had one brush with authoritarianism, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emer-gency in the 1970s, but even she wanted to be thought of as democratic. Modi no longer seems to hold that aspiration. He has consolidated power in his own

Dismantling the World’s Largest DemocracyA new book recounts the inspiring story of how India’s constitution introduced democracy to people who had never experienced it before. Those freedoms are now in jeopardy. By Sonia Faleiro

78 SPRING 2020

hands, fired dissenters, installed pliant heads at major institutions, detained hundreds of opposition leaders, and responded to peaceful protests with vio-lence. To him, the women of Shaheen Bagh are actors in a plot to “destroy national harmony.” In March, Freedom House declared the situation “alarm-ing.” It gave India the largest score decline among the world’s 25 biggest democracies in its annual “Freedom in the World” report.

The speed with which Modi has been able to undermine democracy has frightened many people. Indians now wonder what their constitutional rights really are. Are they absolute? Or can the state revoke them in the so-called national interest?

Seeking answers to these questions has, in recent months, made the Indian Constitution, which happens to be the longest written constitution in the world, a bestseller 70 years after it was first pub-lished. In New Delhi, a publisher told the Hindustan Times that he was selling as many as 5,000 copies a month. At the nationwide protests, which until the new coronavirus outbreak were ongoing in many parts of the country, readings of the document’s preamble represented an opening ceremony that set the tone of the slogans, protest songs, and the call-and-response shouts of “What do we want? Freedom!” that inevitably followed.

The constitutional scholar Madhav Khosla’s new book, India’s Found-ing Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy, therefore couldn’t have been timelier. It delves into the mystery of how some 400 men and women who had spent their lives as colonial subjects went on to create a charter of such breathless ambition. “How did they approach the missing foundations on which self-government was widely thought to be predicated?” Khosla writes. They “met the imperial argument on direct terms. They believed in the possibility of creating democratic citizens through democratic politics.”

These lofty aims were all the more remarkable, the historian Ramachandra

India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising DemocracyMADHAV KHOSLA, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 240 PP., $45, FEBRUARY 2020

India’s high commissioner in London, V.K. Krishna Menon, signs the oath of allegiance to the Indian Constitution at India House in London in front of paintings of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi on Jan. 26, 1950.

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Guha reminds us in his book India After Gandhi, given that they were articulated in the backdrop of “food scarcity, reli-gious riots, refugee resettlement, class war and feudal intransigence.”

India lived in its villages, Gandhi had declared; people were divided by caste, subcaste, and religion. They were beholden to whoever ruled the nearly 600 princely states in the subcontinent, and these states were in turn ruled by the British. They had no direct expe-rience of democracy. Then, as though overnight, these same people were granted a lengthy list of rights. Now they lived in a secular parliamentary democracy with universal adult fran-chise and a single integrated judiciary.

One reason for this breadth of ambi-tion was the quality of the people involved. Even before they’d settled behind the heated desks of the Con-stituent Assembly in Delhi for their first meeting in December 1946, they’d already written themselves into the pages of history. There was India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; his deputy, the nationalist stalwart Vallabh-bhai Patel; Hansa Mehta, a social activ-ist and one of the few women present; and, of course, Bhimrao Ramji Ambed-kar, the brilliant lawyer who was born Dalit, or lower caste, and who oversaw the entire exercise.

But Khosla’s deeply interesting study also shows us what the document didn’t do. For one, he writes, it did not “expli-cate how modern citizenship could meet the problem of a divided society.” Nehru had always rejected communal politics, but after the partition of 1947 and the cre-ation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, he came to view India’s secular policy as central to its identity. He dismissed communalism in India, of which he’d had a ring-side view during the blood-soaked partition riots, as a “myth.” This rejection, Khosla writes, “emerged from denial rather than engagement.”

India wasn’t just split along religious lines. The economy “during the last half-century of colonial rule had been in

a stagnant condition,” the historian Pat-rick French writes in India: A Portrait, “with annual per capita GDP flatlining at 0.1 percent.” Poverty sharpened social exclusion and made it harder for people to exercise their democratic rights. One way to prevent that from happening, as Khosla points out, was through the improvement of social and economic conditions.

Yet for all that Ambedkar had to say on the subject, during a landmark speech he made in the Constituent Assembly, “at no point did he argue for enforceable socioeconomic rights,” Khosla writes. Instead, these rights landed in the Directive Principles of State Policy, which aimed to establish a welfare state but which, unlike fun-damental rights, were not enforceable

The speed with which Modi has been able to undermine democracy has frightened many people. Indians now wonder what their constitutional rights really are.

80 SPRING 2020

Left: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Indian President Ram Nath Kovind during the Republic Day parade at Rajpath in New Delhi on Jan. 26. Right: Protesters celebrate the same day at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi.

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in a court of law. (Another directive principle was the prohibition of alco-hol.) Ambedkar’s thinking, Khosla writes, was that “even though the princi-ples might lack ‘legal force’ and those in power ‘may not have to answer for their breach in a court of law,’ they would ‘cer-tainly have to answer for them before the electorate at election time.’”

There is another matter whose rele-vance is being felt now more than ever before. The Indian Constitution made individual freedoms subservient to the authority of the state. “On the one hand, there is a grand proclamation in favor of a right,” Khosla writes. “On the other hand, there is a strong statement enumerat-ing the exceptions to the realization of the concerned right.” One member of the Constituent Assembly observed this

early on: “Many of [the] fundamental rights have been framed from the point of view of a police constable.”

Indian protesters who are being detained in great droves on charges of sedition, criminal defamation, unlaw-ful assembly, and even just using virtual private networks to access the internet, mostly in BJP-ruled states, are realizing just how true this is. A constitutional clause allowing for “preventive deten-tion” without trial of up to two years has been used to put away thousands of Kashmiris. The freedom fighter Shib-ban Lal Saxena had warned against the clause, calling it “the darkest blot on this constitution.” With Modi in power, the police now have virtually unchecked powers, and the courts are refusing to hear cases that challenge the decisions of the government. “The remarkable irony of the present crisis of constitu-tional democracy,” Khosla writes, “is its uncanny resemblance to the impe-rial ideology.”

The Indian Constitution is unlike any in the world, in that it sought to teach democracy to a people who had never experienced it. It was “first and fore-most a social document,” the historian Granville Austin wrote in 1966. But like any contract, while it was meant to be binding, it could, of course, be broken. “If things go wrong under the new con-stitution,” Ambedkar told the Constit-uent Assembly when presenting the final draft of the document in Novem-ber 1948, “the reason will not be that we had a bad constitution. What we will have to say is, that Man was vile.”

SONIA FALEIRO is a co-founder of the global journalism cooperative Deca and the author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars.

The Indian Constitution is unlike any in the world, in that it sought to teach democracy to a people who had never experienced it.

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FFIGURING, PERHAPS, THAT READERS MIGHT BY NOW have summoned the time and energy to read his previous world-shattering bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the superstar French economist Thomas Piketty is back with an even big-ger, even more imposing encore—one that shares much of the good, and some of the bad, with its predecessor.

If you liked Capital, you’ll probably like the new door-stopper, which came out in French last year and recently hit the shelves in English. Piketty makes the same data-driven arguments about wealth and inequality as before, though on a much broader canvas, and prescribes similar if even more pie-in-the-sky solutions.

In Capital and Ideology, Piketty seeks to do a couple of things he didn’t in the previous book: better explain why and how inequality persists and why even more radical solutions are necessary to reverse the trend. As for the why, Piketty argues that so-called inequality regimes—systems that embed a cycle of inequity—generally exist almost everywhere across the map and in the history books until, in some happy cases, they are swept aside. And those inequality regimes don’t come about by accident but by design. Whether in pre- and post-rev-olutionary France, colonial Haiti, belle epoque Europe, or Ronald Reagan’s America, the rules of the political and eco-nomic game are set up by people of property and privilege in order to propagate more property and privilege.

Inequality isn’t the natural, inevitable outcome of capi-

talism and the market, in other words; it’s an outcome chosen by the haves. “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and polit-ical,” Piketty writes.

At its heart, Capital and Ideology seeks to understand why the less advan-taged masses, who’ve seen their share of the economic pie drastically shrink in recent decades, don’t unite to press for sweeping political changes that could bring economic justice. It has happened plenty of times before, he reminds us: Unfair economic systems that seemed immutable, whether in Edwardian Brit-ain or early 20th-century Sweden, were swept away in a relative blink of an eye and replaced with something more fair.

In Piketty’s hands, that examina-tion reads as though Michel Foucault were glossing Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?: “[I]ntrac-table multidimensional ideological conflicts over inequality, immigration, and national identity … have made it very difficult to achieve majority coa-litions capable of countering the rise of inequality,” he writes.

It wasn’t always—and doesn’t always have to be—so difficult to overturn an unjust system, Piketty argues. While the book dives into more places across a longer stretch of time than Capital, one of the most interesting parts concerns Sweden’s sudden transformation from one of the most unequal (and under-developed) countries in Europe to the polar opposite.

The class-based election system in 19th-century Sweden gave more votes to those owning more property and pay-ing more taxes, which meant that in many villages a single landholder had more votes than the rest of the town combined. These rules guaranteed that, decade after decade, there would be no distribution of property or wealth and little economic dynamism: Throughout the 19th century, Sweden’s top 1 percent controlled about 60 percent of private property, and the top 10 percent owned nearly 90 percent; the

The Tyranny of PropertyThomas Piketty’s new book argues that rising inequality is explained by politics, not economics, and offers some radical solutions.By Keith Johnson

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Capital and IdeologyTHOMAS PIKETTY, TRANS. ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1,104 PP., $39.95, MARCH 2020

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bottom half of the population owned a paltry 3 or 4 percent of property. After the rise of the Social Democrats in the 1920s, who ruled for roughly the next 80 years, that all changed: The wealthy came to control just over half the prop-erty, while the middle and lower classes owned the rest.

Piketty spends a lot of time on the United States, where inequality was rife in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with levels not even approached again until this century. The top 10 percent owned about 85 percent of property at the time of the 1929 stock market crash, for example, before a few decades of New Deal policies, progressive taxa-tion, and political reform pushed that share down closer to 60 percent. After a series of tax cuts for the wealthy that began during the so-called Reagan Rev-olution, the share has crept back up to almost 75 percent. (And the top 1 per-cent has done even better.)

The roller-coaster trajectory of society, and especially the rapid rise in inequal-ity since 1980, has the most bearing on the current state of affairs in the United States and Piketty’s proposed remedies. If the years of Presidents Dwight Eisen-hower, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon featured much higher taxes yet produced higher growth and more equal-ity, Piketty argues, it must be more than a correlation. Likewise, the decades since Reagan have seen much lower taxes, especially on the rich, go hand in hand with greater inequality.

Piketty’s proposed solutions echo many that have taken center stage in this year’s U.S. presidential campaign: A return to the very high tax rates on income and inheritances that were in place during those golden years from 1950 to 1980 would go some way to restoring economic equality and a mea-sure of social justice, Piketty argues, as have Sens. Bernie Sanders and Eliza-beth Warren.

Piketty’s remedies, including what he calls “participatory socialism,” are grounded in part on his reading

of the political—not economic—his-tory of recent decades. In years past, working-class voters sided with social democratic parties such as the U.S. Democrats, Britain’s Labour Party, and Germany’s Social Democratic Party, whereas wealthier voters sided with the parties of property: Republicans, Con-servatives, Christian Democrats, and the like. Then, not just in the United States but across the Western world and in big developing countries like India and Brazil, working-class voters began to abandon center-left parties, which everywhere became the parties of the highly educated. Those parties—Bill Clinton’s Democrats or Tony Blair’s Labour—sought to embrace a less reg-ulated and increasingly globalized eco-nomic landscape, which brought plenty of obvious gains to the highly educated but fewer for the less advantaged.

And that’s why Piketty argues it was the center-left parties that abandoned the working classes and not that the working classes suddenly became rav-ing racists and nativists. While race did play a role for white working-class Americans as they began to abandon the Democrats in the mid-1960s over civil rights, the reversal of what cen-ter-left and center-right parties stood for, and to which part of the elector-ate they appealed, took place nearly everywhere, Piketty argues—even where there was no conflict over race or immigration to explain it.

To reclaim the votes of the less advan-taged and start tackling inequality, Piketty argues, social democratic parties need to abandon market-friendly poli-cies that favor the wealthy and carry out a root-and-branch reform of the entire

political and economic system, even if that means amending constitutions and neutering supreme courts. “Our pres-ent problems cannot be solved with-out major changes to existing political rules,” he writes.

In Capital and Ideology, Piketty goes further than he did in his pre-vious book, calling for radical steps that would essentially make property ownership temporary, put workers and owners on nearly equal footing inside corporations, and implement universal capital endowments, universal health care, and basic incomes—all paid for by sharply higher taxes on the incomes and estates of the rich.

As he outlines his vision of a global federation of socialists overcoming the narrow boundaries of nationalism to rewrite constitutions and join hands in raising taxes, it starts to seem as if many of Piketty’s remedies were genet-ically engineered in a laboratory with the goal of provoking the most virulent possible response among the broadest swath of people.

“I am convinced that capitalism and private property can be superseded,” he concludes, “and that a just society can be established on the basis of participa-tory socialism and social federalism.”

In the end, as in Capital, Piketty’s new book seems more valuable when it is descriptive than when it turns pre-scriptive. The reams of economic data he unearths are eye-opening; many of his proposed solutions seem eye-rolling in the current climate. But as he points out, radical solutions once seemed unthinkable in the past, too—until sud-denly they no longer were.

Given the starring role that inequal-ity has assumed in today’s political discourse—in no small part due to his previous book—Piketty’s latest effort is a very welcome, very controversial, and, in another time and place, possi-bly even constructive contribution.

KEITH JOHNSON (@KFJ_FP) is a senior staff writer at FOREIGN POLICY.

It wasn’t always—and doesn’t always have to be—so difficult to overturn an unjust system.

WHAT CONNECTS US IS STRONGER

THAN WHAT DIVIDES US.

Lisa McFadin, Healthcare Entrepreneur

Connect, Not Divide.

Access to mobile networks – regardless of location – creates new opportunities in every industry, like education, healthcare

and transportation. It empowers entrepreneurs to develop the next medical breakthrough - such as accelerating

recovery for stroke victims using VR technology.

Some politicians are trying to disconnect communities across America, leaving families, businesses, schools,

hospitals, and even entrepreneurs, in the dark.

86 SPRING 2020

IN SEPTEMBER 2011, years before U.S. President Donald Trump pushed the United States into a trade war with China, Iowa state police caught three men trespassing near a cornfield under con-tract with the agrochemical giant Monsanto. The encounter caught the attention of the FBI and led it to the Chinese-born engineer Robert Mo, who became a suspect in the industrial espionage investigation that is the focus of the journalist Mara Hvistendahl’s new book, The Scientist and the Spy—a nuanced look at some of the pawns in the U.S.-China rivalry.

The FBI suspected Mo and his associates at the Beijing-based agricultural company DBN of a plot to smuggle genetically modified corn seeds—closely guarded trade secrets—to China. Through her reporting in China and the United States, Hvistendahl recounts the case with the vivid details and pace of a spy thriller. Mo, who is ini-tially reluctant to take part in the theft,

enlists a Midwestern seed breeder as an unwitting accomplice in the cover-up, putting them both at the center of a story with global implications. And an FBI agent finds himself crisscross-ing Iowa to get to the bottom of it.

Amid the scale of the recent U.S.-China trade war, whose latest cease-fire involved China promising to buy $200 bil-lion of U.S. agricultural goods, it’s easy to miss the products at the center of it. Hvistendahl, who previously covered science and technology in Shanghai, starts with the seeds. Corn—which feeds chicken and pigs—is essential to Chi-na’s food security and its growing middle class. Most hybrid seed lines belong to just two companies: DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto (now part of Bayer), on behalf of which the U.S. government brought charges against Mo in 2013. With scientific research and development booming in China, the state has prioritized technological innovation: It’s no secret why the seeds would be valuable in the hands of a Chinese firm. “Theft is expedient—especially if there is little chance of getting caught,” Hvistendahl writes.

Mo’s case reflects the rising tensions between China and the United States, particularly over technology. It also foreshadows today’s growing American suspicion of Chinese academics and scientists, setting a precedent by which espionage charges may be filed against those not working directly for a foreign state.

Hvistendahl digs into these issues and finds troubling

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evidence. Through previously unreleased FBI documents, she traces a long history of racial profiling and botched coun-terintelligence on China. To monitor Mo’s movements and bug his associates’ car, the FBI uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—not initially intended for targets on U.S. soil. “If China is shaped by the dueling forces of copying and innovation, America is locked in its own internal struggle, between openness and security,” she writes. As these inves-tigations increase, it appears that a perceived need for more security is winning out.

Hvistendahl presents Mo’s case as a Rorschach test: In the ill-conceived plot, one person might see an imminent secu-rity threat, and another might see a story of corporate over-reach. That ambiguity is echoed in the relationship between the powers themselves: If China and the United States are on the verge of a new cold war, she writes, it is a “conflict with no clear winner.”—Audrey Wilson

The Scientist and the Spy: A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial EspionageMARA HVISTENDAHL, RIVERHEAD BOOKS, 336 PP., $28, FEBRUARY 2020

The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest AgeELIZABETH SHACKELFORD, PUBLICAFFAIRS, 304 PP., $16.99, MAY 2020

AMID THE CHAOS OF THE VIETNAM WAR, the U.S. State Department established a formal system for diplomats to express oppo-sition to policies they were tasked with carrying out. In the-ory, the so-called dissent channel could help serve as a way to prevent foreign-policy disasters—such as the Vietnam War—by allowing even the most junior officers to bypass bureaucracy and send a memo directly to the secretary of state’s inner circle to raise alarm bells over a U.S. policy.

Today, the dissent channel occupies an important place in the State Department’s psyche. It’s a rarely used system yet one that U.S. diplomats often boast about as a testament to the strength and resilience of American foreign-policy lead-ers. But in this day and age, does speaking truth to power make a difference?

Elizabeth Shackelford, a former career diplomat, grapples with this question in The Dissent Channel, a personal mem-oir about her tour in war-torn South Sudan and her decision to resign on moral grounds in 2017. Anger, despondence, and resentment drip from the pages as Shackelford recounts how she and her colleagues at the embassy in Juba pushed Wash-ington to condemn atrocities perpetrated by the South Suda-nese government—after the United States helped midwife the country into existence in 2011—to little or no avail. She pulls no punches in showing how South Sudan became one of the most stunning failures in modern U.S. foreign policy.

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Time and again, Washington refused to sharply condemn government forces under President Salva Kiir Mayardit as they fought his former deputy-turned-rival, Riek Machar. Accusations of mass killings, rape, and other war crimes by both sides were prevalent. The U.S. government repeatedly called for calm and issued vague threats of reprisals that it rarely followed up on.

Shackelford presents familiar arguments on the dangers of Trump’s foreign policy, but the book really shines in her blow-by-blow account of what a U.S. embassy does in a time of crisis. She and other embassy personnel worked 16 to 20 hours a day trying to track down and evacuate U.S. citizens, sending cables back to Washington on the spiraling con-flict, and interviewing survivors of mass killings and other atrocities—if for nothing else than for the historical record.

After returning home, Shackelford and some of her col-leagues decided to use the dissent channel as a last resort, writing a memo for the secretary of state urging Washington to change course in South Sudan and lambasting the countless empty threats that only served to embolden that country’s government. But the report was shelved, U.S. policy didn’t change, and Shackelford ran out of options.

The book deserves praise for telling the overlooked—though not untold—story of South Sudan’s stunning col-lapse and Washington’s refusal to recognize its own failures. But The Dissent Channel also poses bigger questions about how diplomats and others in government can speak truth to power in an age when the truth, and those speaking it, can come under attack.

Shackelford’s assessment of the State Department’s dis-sent channel is blunt, grim, and convincing. “It means some-thing, perhaps. It’s a message of sorts,” she writes. “One could generously describe it as a type of departmental sug-gestion box, though it would be more accurate to picture it as a shredder.”—Robbie Gramer

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British DissentPRIYAMVADA GOPAL, VERSO BOOKS, 624 PP., $39.95, JUNE 2019

reported it as a factual event. It reflected, perhaps, a funda-mental unease about the acquisition of empire—a feeling often underplayed in historical accounts. From the begin-nings of British rule, many in Britain itself could see the atrocities of imperialism, just as the Roman historian Tacitus had written of his own countrymen, through the words of a Caledonian chieftain, nearly 2,000 years earlier: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire.”

Domestic opposition to empire is well documented, but the Britain-based Indian scholar Priyamvada Gopal’s achieve-ment in Insurgent Empire is to tie together those movements with the resistance to empire on its bloody fringes. The efforts of dissidents, rebels, and intellectuals in India, Africa, and the diaspora inspired, she argues, radicals at home—not just to challenge the empire but to fight the systems of power and oppression it was built on. In her telling, the birth of ideas of universal rights and economic injustice owed as much to foreign criticisms as domestic ones.

The figures—the new domestic insurgents—Gopal unearths are strikingly cosmopolitan ones in a period where various factions were often wrongly depicted as monolithic. For example, Gopal presents the account of Shapurji Saklat-vala, the third Indian to be elected a member of the British Parliament in 1922. Each of those Indians were Parsis, the Zoroastrian minority that played an unusually dominant role in trade but which also spanned the political spectrum from conservative pro-imperialist to Saklatvala’s radicalism. Saklatvala proved one of the most trenchant and influential critics of the empire that had brought him from Bombay (now Mumbai) to London—and was a founder of the multi-national League Against Imperialism in 1927.

One of the most moving accounts is that of George William Gordon, a businessman and landowner in Jamaica whose role in an uprising against the tyranny of the colonial governor led to his execution by the local authorities. Gordon’s death prompted fierce dissent in London and several attempts to put Edward Eyre, the governor, on trial for murder.

Insurgent Empire is a long book and not always easily digestible—especially for those unversed in the periods it describes. Gopal has a sharp eye for forgotten characters and lost histories, but the information comes thick and fast, and the sheer scale of the book, going from early 19th-cen-tury India to the Harlem Renaissance, can make it difficult to keep track of. The richest part is, perhaps, her descrip-tion of London in the 1930s, when the imperial metropole became the center of a tangle of resistance movements and even conventional British opinion began to smell the end of empire in the wind.— James Palmer

AUDREY WILSON (@audreybwilson) is an associate editor, ROBBIE

GRAMER (@RobbieGramer) is a staff writer, and JAMES PALMER (@BeijingPalmer) is a deputy editor, all at FOREIGN POLICY.

IN 1843, BRITISH GEN. CHARLES NAPIER seized the kingdom of Sindh, in present-day Pakistan, using the pretext of a local rebellion for a blatant land grab. In response, the British satirical magazine Punch published a spoof news article claiming that the general’s report of his actions to London had been conveyed in a single-word telegram: Peccavi—Latin for “I have sinned.”

The reference became so famous that later textbooks often

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artifact

RTV 31, the future never arrived. Once one of Britain’s most anticipated innovations, the

test vehicle lay in a scrap heap until it was rescued more than 40 years ago by a group of conservationists intent on transforming a redundant power station’s coal yards into a wildlife haven and museum.

In the 1960s, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson prom-ised that a “new Britain” would be forged in the “white heat” of a new scientific revolution. Combining the newly invented hovercraft with a linear induction motor, the tracked hover-craft train would ride on a cushion of air produced by fans.

The track would be shaped like a T, with aluminum plates fixed on either side. Four pads provided the lift, with four more pads placed above them, rotating vertically to keep the RTV 31 balanced. Snow, rain, and debris would slide off the plates, keeping the train moving even in bad weather.

“Like to travel by train at 300 miles an hour? We may do in a few years’ time!” a news clip promised in 1966. Scien-tists hoped the RTV 31 would transport passengers from London to Glasgow in just two hours, outpacing the era’s conventional trains threefold. The project was budgeted at 5 million pounds—the equivalent of $130 million today.

As the speed of test vehicles increased, scientists discov-ered that the hovertrain needed less energy to keep it in motion than its wheeled counterparts. The monorail-style concrete blocks used on the track were simpler than existing railbeds, significantly reducing the cost of infrastructure.

A Train to NowhereHovertrains were meant to revolutionize British transport. But they never arrived. By Kitty Wenham-Ross

However, trouble was on the horizon. The hoverpads required a lot of power and were so heavy they weighed down the train itself. The linear induction motor was bulky—not only difficult to build but making any adjustments a big job. The cost of building and laying new tracks was considered too high, and the project began to lose political support.

Eric Laithwaite, the inventor of the linear induction motor and an early pro-ponent of the hovertrain, proclaimed it was “far too dangerous” to use, with the possibility of driving itself off the track.

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rival high-speed project using hydrau-lic rams that could tilt the train as it turned to build up speed. The govern-ment could not justify funding two separate high-speed rail projects, and the APT was chosen. It proved to be equally doomed.

Elsewhere in Britain, the designers of the maglev train replaced the RTV 31’s problematic hoverpads with elec-tromagnets. The tracked hovercraft now had to compete with the zero- energy, steel-wheeled APT and the lower-energy lift system of the mag-lev train. But the British government never took up the technology; instead, East Asian countries pushed forward with high-speed rail.

Today, maglev technology pow-ers the fastest route in the world: the Shanghai-to-Beijing bullet train, trav-eling up to 268 mph. In 2015, Japan unveiled plans to introduce a new track between Tokyo and Osaka that would be able to travel at a record-breaking 314 mph. The prospect of British high-speed rail, however, constantly hovers but is never realized.

KITTY WENHAM�ROSS (@kittywenham) is an English journalist.

The RTV 31 hovercraft train in Peterborough, England, on Jan. 25.

improvement but a disappointment compared with its initial promise of being able to travel between London and Glasgow in just a couple of hours.

One week later, funding for the proj-ect was officially canceled. Still, the excitement of the hovertrain’s devel-opment is remembered fondly by those who were young at the time. It was a staple of news broadcasts, a promise that would revolutionize communities.

In the meantime, British Rail was advancing its plans to create the Advanced Passenger Train (APT), a

Other systems using the linear induc-tion motor, most notably early maglev (“magnetic levitation”) projects, were leading the way—and the hovertrain struggled to keep up. In its first-ever test run, the train reached a discouraging 12 miles per hour. Estimates in 1972 that the project wouldn’t be ready until 1985 delivered another devastating blow.

A test track was built near Ely, in Cambridgeshire. In 1973, the RTV 31 hovered a few inches above a concrete track for the very first time. It reached a speed of 104 mph—a significant

Photo by KITTY WENHAM�ROSS